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Solitude Quotes
"I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world."
4
"I have stood still and stopped the sound of feetWhen far away an interrupted cryCame over houses from another street,But not to call me back or say good-bye;And further still at an unearthly height,A luminary clock against the skyProclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.I have been one acquainted with the night."
4
"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with."
4
"Every man must have a peaceful place to contemplate. If you do not have such a place, you must find one!"
3
"When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
3
"Retire within yourselves, but first prepare yourselves to receive yourselves there. It would be madness to trust yourselves to yourselves if you do not know how to control yourselves. There are ways of failing in solitude as well as in company."
3
"Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."
3
"Aloneness is the presence of oneself, solitude is the presence of God."
2
"When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me."
2
"And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home."
2
"Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact."
2
"The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room."
2
"And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself; that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity."
1
"I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me."
1
"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."
1
"I'm still lonely and it's a glorification of something I'm not finished with. I don't want to be distracted from my work by other people, but the absence of it all distracts me from my work and that's why I run towards the city, to get a little glimpse of it."
1
"Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed."
1
"I'm never less at leisure than when at leisure, or less alone than when alone."
1
"I...think it much more supportable to be always alone, than never to be so."
1
"You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you're the house where people come and go as they please, because you're simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn't let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You're still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn't have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert."
1
"This great misfortune - to be incapable of solitude."
1
"One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude."
1
"The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored."
1
"In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again."
1
"If one's different, one's bound to be lonely."
1
"I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital [Paris]."
1
"It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them."
1
"Sometimes solitude is a real heaven for the tired minds and a marvellous sanctuary for the wounded souls!"
1
"Even in the loneliest momentsi have been therefor myself."
1
"Solitude, at first is scary. All you have is yourself. After a while its comforting, it knows the real you and cant judge you for it. If you live it long enough it becomes an addiction, like all things, too much of it and you will go insane but not enough of it will also send you there."
1
"It might behoove us to realize that isolation is the absence of all the senseless clutter, and all the incessant racket that would keep God from having ample room to show up and sufficient silence to be heard. Therefore, isolation may actually be the place where we are least isolated."
1
"Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."
1
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