Solitude Quotations | Page 4

True bravery means doing alone that which one could do if all the world were by.

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.

Now literary success can only be won in solitude by persevering labor.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

I like people. I like watching them. It's just that I'd prefer to do it from a mile away using very powerful binoculars.

Even with one companion ecstasy is almost banished.

By all means use sometimes to be alone.

I took a great deal of pleasure in it, and I still feel nostalgic about it. However, I felt that it had led me to live in a parallel world of pure invention, shut inside my solitude. Naturally, it was precisely for that purpose that it was made and that was why I took pleasure in it, but I wanted to regain body and roots.

It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.

Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.

Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. Tibullus by all means use sometimes to be alone.

In solitude, be a multitude to thyself.

By all means use some time to be alone, salute thyself, see what thy soul doth wear.

How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude!

... life is a solitude ...

Fatigue can make it hard to have faith. Too much busyness can make it hard to have faith. Too much of too little solitude can impact faith. For that matter, so can a bout of hunger or overwork, anything carried to an extreme. Faith thrives on routine. Look at any monastery and you will see that. Faith keeps on keeping on.

Jesus but people got weird when they lived alone.

I didn't choose solitude.

Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.

The cure for too much to do is solitude and silence.

I am never less alone than when alone.

I am not sure what lonliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone." "What do you fear then?" he asked her. She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words. "Never finding myself again....

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves - which makes us more indulgent and more understanding - and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

Solitude is the mother of anxieties.

If you would live innocently, seek solitude.

You only grow when you are alone.

There is nothing harder to come by than detachment and solitude; and nothing more important.

Solitude begets whimsies.

The power to bring me out of solitude - or to push me back into it - had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.

We must get to the place of real solitude with Christ. He is our mountain-height and our sea-calm.

Solitude with God repairs the damage done by the fret and noise and clamour of the world.

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.

It was solitude, but it was solitude that wasn't lonely. Solitude that could sort things out. And he hadn't had that in ages.

A room of one's own isn't nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one's own.

Social life is filled with doubts and vain aspirings; solitude, when the imagination is dethroned, is turned to weariness and ennui.

I am persuaded there is no such thing after all as a perfect enjoyment of solitude; for the more delicious the solitude the more one wants a companion.

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.

I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

I'd rather be home alone, painting.

A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.

Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.

A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom.

We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.

Ambition is, of all other, the most contrary humor to solitude; and glory and repose are so inconsistent that they cannot possibly inhabit one and the same place; and for so much as I understand, those have only their arms and legs disengaged from the crowd, their mind and intention remain engaged behind more than ever.

Alone, I am drunk on my thoughts; in company, I am sober again.

Self-absorption intensifies isolation, but permits it to go unnoticed.

A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.

When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely... Having a big family solves that problem.

I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.

The poor attend to their own virtue in solitude.

We need to build downtime into our lives, so that we can have solitude without feeling overcome with guilt.

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

Consider well before you immerse yourself in solitude whether your own company will be good for you.

The cat makes himself the companion of your hours of solitude, melancholy and toil.

If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.

Amid all your duties, keep some hours to yourself.

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.

Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

Aloneness is the presence of oneself. Aloneness is very positive... You are so full of presence that you can fill the whole universe with your presence and there is no need for anybody.

Loneliness is failed solitude.

...nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book... ...

The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.

Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences

I love and in a way need, a private secret place. It's a kind of deep obsession, but I also love to need and be with friends and the two things often need to be together... it's a painful conflict that will never be smoothly resolved.

Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society...

Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, But God to man doth speak in solitude.

Solitude, the sly enemy that doth separate a man from well-doing.

O sweet woods, the delight of solitariness!

Worthy books Are not companions – they are solitudes: We lose ourselves in them and all our cares.

What remains is solitude.

I am thinking of you in my sleepless solitude tonight.

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.

There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.

Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression...

I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.

A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.' 'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?

At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

No one can help us to achieve the intimate isolation by which we find our secret worlds, so mysterious, rich and full. If others intervene, it is destroyed. This degree of thought, which we attain by freeing ourselves from the external world, must be fed by the inner spirit, and our surroundings cannot influence us in any way other than to leave us in peace.

Winter solitude- in a world of one colour the sound of the wind.

There is no insurmountable solitude.