Alone Quotes

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In short, we are neither "warmongers" nor "appeasers," neither "hard" nor "soft." We are Americans, determined to defend the frontiers of freedom, by an honorable peace if peace is possible, but by arms if arms are used against us. And if we are to move forward in that spirit, we shall need all the calm and thoughtful citizens that this great University can produce, all the light they can shed, all the wisdom they can bring to bear. It is customary, both here and around the world, to regard life in the United States as easy. Our advantages are many. But more than any other people on earth, we bear burdens and accept risks unprecedented in their size and their duration, not for ourselves alone but for all who wish to be free.

John F. Kennedy

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things - but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.

Charles Dickens

In the study of the sciences which depend on mathematics, those who do not consult nature, but authors, are not the children of nature; they are only her grandchildren. Nature alone is the master of true genius.

Leonardo da Vinci

Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Virtue alone is sufficient to make a man great, glorious, and happy.

Benjamin Franklin

I drink a lot of beer, and that's the drug of choice. You find the drug that works for you. I know, for instance, this guy named Harlan Ellison - and he's not alone - who's very proud of the fact that he doesn't put dope into his body. He tries not to put additives into his body, or anything like that. But he can afford to do that because Harlan's drug of choice is Harlan.

In the context of the "great mystery" of Christ and of the Church, all are called to respond - as a bride - with the gift of their lives to the inexpressible gift of the love of Christ, who alone, as the Redeemer of the world, is the Church's Bridegroom.

Pope John Paul II

O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe'er, But falls into abatement and low price, Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy, That it alone is high fantastical.

William Shakespeare

Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us - of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.

The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

In this administration also it has been necessary at times to issue specific warnings — warnings that we could not stand by and watch the Communists conquer Laos by force, or intervene in the Congo, or swallow West Berlin, or maintain offensive missiles on Cuba. But while our goals were at least temporarily obtained in these and other instances, our successful defense of freedom was due not to the words we used, but to the strength we stood ready to use on behalf of the principles we stand ready to defend. This strength is composed of many different elements, ranging from the most massive deterrents to the most subtle influences. And all types of strength are needed — no one kind could do the job alone.

John F. Kennedy

The spirit burning but unbent,
May writhe, rebel—the weak alone repent!

If any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone. For God hath made man to enjoy felicity and constancy of good.

It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.

Napoleon I of France

'Shit,' said Eddie. 'What the fuck they kill that Davy for?'
'Let's leave it alone, Eddy,' Thomas Hudson said. 'It's way past things we know about.'

Ernest Hemingway

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

No man's thoughts are new, but the style of their expression is the never-failing novelty which cheers and refreshes men. If we were to answer the question, whether the mass of men, as we know them, talk as the standard authors and reviewers write, or rather as this man writes, we should say that he alone begins to write their language at all.

Henry David Thoreau

Upon the hearth the fire is red, Beneath the roof there is a bed; But not yet weary are our feet, Still round the corner we may meet A sudden tree or standing stone That none have seen but we alone. Tree and flower and leaf and grass, Let them pass! Let them pass!

J. R. R. Tolkien

A great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle [patriotism] alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.

George Washington

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Talk had faded with the daylight. The silence that set in was oppressive. The encroaching dark, the groundmist collecting into small, curdled pools... for the first time it seemed perfectly real and totally unnatural, and he wanted either Jan or his mother, some woman, and he wondered what in the hell he was doing and how he ever could have gotten involved. He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.

But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?

J. R. R. Tolkien

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.

Edgar Allan Poe