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Solitude Quotes
"One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening."
11
"And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own."
11
"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."
11
"I watched the moon alone, unable to share his cold beauty with anyone."
10
"Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe."
9
"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."
9
"Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, "society, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people-"base."
8
"Sitting in a corner, I live like a toad Oh! How I love my room: my tiny abode! Here I wake up; and I sleep in hereThe world far away; yet virtually near Not that I'm jailed in this place of graceJust don't want to face another face."
7
"I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me."
7
"How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself."
7
"I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of."
7
"An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."
7
"Solitude has seven skins, nothing gets through any more."
6
"It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it."
6
"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."
6
"You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live."
6
"There are some places in life where you can only go alone. Embrace the beauty of your solo journey."
6
"Every man must have a peaceful place to contemplate. If you do not have such a place, you must find one!"
5
"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."
5
"We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.One's inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one's most intimate sources.In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures."
5
"If one's different, one's bound to be lonely."
5
"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]."
5
"I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."
5
"He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon."
5
"She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart."
5
"I always welcomed the comforting cloak of night except for the times when I lost something in it."
4
"The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken."
4
"There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying."
4
"Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us."
4
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