Solitude Quotes - Page 3

I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

I descended into solitude so thick that conversations with repairmen became anxious social occasions.

I’d like to have enough time and quietTo think about absolutely nothing,To not ever feel myself living,To only know myself in others’ eyes, reflected.

The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.

I am so tired. I have grown old from being serious. I have grown ill from being serious. I want to laugh at myself. I want to forget myself. I am so tired.

We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some-more spectacularly-squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer God. Their solitude is a self-moritification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind.Grenouille's case was nothing of the sort. There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance or wating for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. 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 lived in the wide world outside.

Some people are so boring that you are more bored when you are with them … than when you are alone.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

For the modern solitary, the quest for silence has vastly broader boundaries than what one's predecessors faced. Solitude is real only when it is relative to the world in which it is lived. It is unreal if attempted in fantasy--as though telephones and fax machines, the Internet and E-mail did not exist. (36)

When words don't come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing." ~ Strider Marcus Jones, Poet

One will probably have to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)

He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal.

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.

He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.

Things hurt more when you were alone, that was all.

...children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-- to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

On the way home my father said tiredly he hoped some day I'd realize it was necessary to live with people. I didn't understand him. He said a lot of other things that made me feel sorry for him, because he just couldn't stand up to a situation.

Unerring solitude forces a person to confront their morality and aloneness. Solitude makes personal confession possible.

Solitude is a gift you give yourself every day.

As some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that I cannot bear so much society as you can. I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough of it this year I shall cry all the next.

She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd.

But there remained a reflective solitude behind that laughter, that nagging sense of completion that didn't sit well on the shoulders of a woman who had just begun to open her eyes to the wide world.

Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest.What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude.

Thus weary of the world, away she hies,And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aidTheir mistress mounted through the empty skiesIn her light chariot quickly is convey'd;Holding their course to Paphos, where their queenMeans to immure herself and not be seen.

a person can also find solitude with others, though it is more difficult

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.

The strongest man is the one who stands most alone.

But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party.

The most perfect solitude must entail the absence of all beings, but it must also tremble with the light of life. For example, a perfect solitude may find itself haunted by lives born of the imagination, characters lying on shelves in rows of books, or accompanied by figures waiting in dreams. The perfect solitude pushes one to sense the pulse of solitude itself; for example, a perfect solitude may be marked with the beat of one’s heart.

You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write

Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.

I praise the Frenchman his remark was shrewd - "How sweet how passing sweet is solitude." But grant me still a friend in my retreat Whom I may whisper - Solitude is sweet.

I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.

Genuine tranquility of the heart and perfect peace of mind, the highest blessings on earth after health, are to be found only in solitude and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion.

We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.

Solitude is a greater treasure than wealth.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

If from Society we learn to live Tis Solitude should teach us how to die It hath no flatterers.

Solitude is a catalyst for innovation

Night when words fade and things come alive when the destructive analysis of day is done and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

The evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do.Inside my apartment I'd felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone, to be reassured. Or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world. Or it was neither of these--I was afraid I was dreaming. Indeed, considering the events of the day, it was likely that I was dreaming. I sometimes fly in my dreams, and each time I say to myself, "At last--it's happening in reality and not in a dream!"In any case, I needed to talk to someone, and I was alone. This is my habitual condition, by choice--or so I tell myself. Mere acquaintanceship leaves me unsatisfied, and few people are willing to accept the burdens and risks of friendship as I conceive of it.

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration than those which I now enjoy. I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning. The only drawbacks to this solitude are the want of information on the progress of scientific discovery in Europe and the lack of all the advantages arising from an interchange of ideas.

Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.

You can really never give birth to anything in this world without solitude.

Living alone,' November whispered, 'is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn't overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being.

He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul.

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

At one point in your life you have to decide whether you want to become a sachem or a solitary.

One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)

The soul that knows suffering, understand the grace of solitude.

Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.

People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.

I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace