Solitude Quotes - Page 15

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.

It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls.""There are always walls." I say.

Until you experience real loneliness, you shall never know what real loneliness is. So many people feel miserable and lonely just because they ignore their inner man, create a gap between themselves and their inner man, and neglect their true self!

A lonely day is God's way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.

He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating - and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside.

How difficult it is to find solitude in a world that constantly demands your attention.

It is a great thing to be able to make God your source and the time of solitude presents you with that opportunity.

You ought to pause and enjoy the peace in the moment.

It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.

I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.

In solitude, struggles occur that no one else knows about. Inner battles are fought here that seldom become fodder for sermons or illustrations for books. God, who probes our deepest thoughts during protracted segments of solitude, opens our eyes to things that need attention. It is here He makes us aware of those things we try to hide from others.

Solitude helps you to see life the way it is.

Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.

What's so magical about solitude? In many fields, it's only when you're alone that you can engage in deliberate practice. This is the key to exceptional achievement.

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.

Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.

...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

Talk to the creator in a state of peace and solitude and ask Him a question concerning the purpose of your living

I know I can't own a hilltop, a meadow, or a mountainside. But keeping it a secret somehow makes it mine.

We have testimony about solitude from the most creative among us. For Mozart, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer -- say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep -- it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly." For Kafka, "You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked." For Thomas Mann, "Solitude gives birth the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -- to poetry." For Picasso, "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

I paused to listen to the silence. My breath, crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead. The day was dying, the night being born — but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence — a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance — that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.

I find it quite incredible how much peace and quiet a person actually needs in order to devote himself entirely to his thoughts.

Sometimes I look out the window out into the big, bright world and stare at people. Passers-by who live their ordinary lives and experience a full range of extraoridnary emotions. I stare at them for minutes, sometimes hours and then it makes me think, it makes me wonder. Are there people who are born healthy, who are born perfectly normal yet there is something wrong with them? Something nobody feels, nobody understands or questions, something that no one has ever even heard of? What if there are people among us who are capable of truly falling for someone, who are - in all biological, emotional, hormonal, chemical, philosophical senses - capable of loving someone with romantic love but no one in this wide world is capable of requiting that? Is it possible? Is it the fault of that person? Is it perhaps in the genes, the very DNA of someone? Is it perhaps destiny? And those passers-by go along happily without knowing anyone has ever asked something like this and they will probably never think about anything such because there might be only one person in this world who has to experience the feeling, the feeling that is so deeply rooted in a life alone.

If a man should ascend alone into heaven and behold clearly the structure of the universe and the beauty of the stars, there would be no pleasure for him in the awe-inspiring sight, which would have filled him with delight if he had had someone to whom he could describe what he had seen. Nature abhors solitude.

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.

Solitude is a temple for me.

A friendship where you're always trying to be considerate of the other person, always worrying about what they think, always responding to every single text, always seeking their approval and then finally connecting with them, isn't friendship at all.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to live to yourself.

If I exist, then surely there must be someone else out there like me.

A person devolves his or her hardiness from the ark-like powers of love to create, protect, and destroy. When we are in love, we discover what we long to become, we also discover what we lack. When we are in love, we are empowered to seek out our destiny. When we lose at love, our confidence is devastated. In the wake of a breakup with a lover, we languish in solitude. Caught in the riptide of incompleteness, we suffer terribly.

And while he sat there on the end of the jetty, he’d let the sound of the waves fill his ears, watch the clouds and schools of tiny sweetfish, take pebbles he’d pocketed on the way and throw them out into the deep. Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting “out there” was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting out my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name and the name of my birthplace and the name of my race; after judging and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.

Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life - that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

Looking at the rain through my window,I can’t find an answer to this merciless solitude—The same solitude that sprouts from my eyes,A bittersweet tear which haunts me like a shadow.During evenings like this my life is about sad memories.At times I believe you’re so evil, but at end of the day you make the effort to change what my mind tells.Why don’t you turn away and let me find the love that I need?I hope you will never abandon my life and when that beautiful day comesI am going to thank you for being my lovely company.You! Eternal loneliness that poisons me-Don’t feel miserable due to these words,I only use you to drown my sorrows, to not die alone in omission.

Solitude is very different from a ’time-out’ from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and "slowness.

A writer is anyone who follows only the truth of who they are, without ever relying on anything other than the poverty and solitude of that truth. In this respect, children and women in love are born writers.

I think I’ll feel out of place wherever I go on earth, forever. But that’s fine. I have to make my peace with that.

O lead me onward to the loneliest shade, The darkest place that quiet ever made, Where kingcups grow most beauteous to behold And shut up green and open into gold.

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

Introverts live in two worlds: We visit the world of people, but solitude and the inner world will always be our home.

It is true that many young people who wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily, feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way—; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer—: but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

It is so easy at times for a lonely individual to begin fantasizing about what the people outside are saying about him and, in result, irrationally and fearfully, and sometimes angrily, fancy himself a villain.

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.

A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It's scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you're going to stumble upon a secret place where everyone will jump out at you. And then, when you are the very last seeker, you start to wonder if you're the only person in the world. If the hiding place somehow sucked up the players and the last one has to decide to run away or get sucked up, too.

We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.

What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.

I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.

But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!

I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect