Solitude Quotes

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However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.

We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.

As our lives speed up more and more, so do our children's. We forget and thus they forget that there is nothing more important than the present moment. We forget and thus they forget to relax, to find spiritual solitude, to let go of the past, to quiet ambition, to fully enjoy the eating of a strawberry, the scent of a rose, the touch of a hand on a cheek...

Solitude takes time. One becomes alone, like a towel drying.

James Richardson

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.

Barbara Kingsolver

But the knowledge of the library is not that of the world; a youth of solitude is bad preparation for a manhood of action; from the earliest age we need to mingle with our kind; the child corrects and instructs the child more than their masters; our equals are the tools wherewith experience works out its lessons; and the play-ground, with its rival interests, its injustices, its necessity for the ready wit and the curbed temper is both miniature and prophesy of the world, which will but bring back the old struggles only with a sterner aspect, and the same successes, but with more than half their enjoyment departed.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others.... Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

Jonathan Franzen

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

Gabriel García Márquez

Loneliness is a drug, a narcotic; it grows through veins, through nerves and muscles; it assumes some right of possession over your body and mind; it feeds itself, and creates its own requirement. Loneliness and solitude are walls.

As an introvert, you can be your own best friend or your worst enemy. The good news is we generally like our own company, a quality that extroverts often envy. We find comfort in solitude and know how to soothe ourselves.

— social life is fill'd
With doubts and vain aspirings; solitude,
When the imagination is dethroned,
Is turned to weariness.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.

In my solitude I sing to myself a sweet lullaby, as sweet as my mother used to sing to me.

Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.

Brennan Manning

How many minds — almost all the great ones — were formed in secrecy and solitude!

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.

She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.

Suffering is only suffering if it's done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.

I'm afraid my closely guarded solitude causes some hurt feelings now and then. But how to explain, without wounding someone, that you want to be wholly in the world you are writing about, that it would take two days to get the visitor's voice out of the house so that you could listen to your own characters again?

Margaret Bourke-White

Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships.

Douglas Coupland

Youth is ever apt to judge in haste,
And lose the medium in the wild extreme,
Do not repent, but regulate your passion:
Though love is reason, its excess is rage.
Give me, at least, your promise to reflect,
In cool, impartial solitude, and still.
No last decision till we meet again.

We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition.

The world steals us from ourselves and solitude restores us. The world is composed of a herd, which are ever flying from themselves.

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles