Solitude Quotes

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One of the marks of maturity is the need for solitude: a city should not merely draw men together in many varied activities, but should permit each person to find, near at hand, moments of seclusion and peace.

There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

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.

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

Gabriel García Márquez

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

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

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

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

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

James Richardson

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...

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.

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.

People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

Chapter: Every Indication of Inadvertant Solitude I think it's fair to guess that most of Richard Dawkins' many readers are not using The Selfish Gene and its successors as textbooks to help them pass science exams. That he is a highly distinguished scientist is not in question, but many scientists have achieved great distinction - and indeed written textbooks - without once writing a popular best-seller.

And here they met:—where should Love's meeting be —
Love passionate, and spiritual, and deep—
Where, but in such a haunted solitude—
A green and natural temple—fitting shrine
For vows the stars remember ?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude / And flew to the silence of sweet solitude.

The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.

Thornton Wilder

She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The homestead policy was established only after long and earnest resistance; experience proves its wisdom. The lands in the hands of industrious settlers, whose labor creates wealth and contributes to the public resources, are worth more to the United States than if they had been reserved as a solitude for future purchasers.

But two miles more, and then we rest!
Well, there is still an hour of day,
And long the brightness of the West
Will light us on our devious way;
Sit then, awhile, here in this wood—
So total is the solitude,
We safely may delay.

Charlotte Brontë

Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life....We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.

I needed to be in the bush. There I find solitude and beauty and purity and focus. That's where my heart lies.

I learned... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.

How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself.