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Solitude Quotes


"Dantes,rejected by all the world,frequently experienced a desire for solitude, and what solitude is at the same time more complete,more poetical , than that of a bark floating isolated on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in the silence of immensity and under the eye of Heaven? Now this solitude was peopled with this thoughts, the night lighted by his illusions, and the silence animated by his anticipations."


"Je fais mon lit et mon ménage; I seek my dinner in a restaurant; my supper takes care of itself; I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering, poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom a will and testament not to be disputed has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven."


"We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness."



"I guess I m too used to sitting in a small room and making words do a few things. I see enough of humanity at the racetracks, the supermarkets, gas stations, freeways, cafes, etc. This can t be helped. But I feel like kicking myself in the ass when I go to gatherings, even if the drinks are free. It never works for me. I ve got enough clay to play with. People empty me. I have to get away to refill. I m what s best for me, sitting here slouched, smoking a beedie and watching this creen flash the words. Seldom do you meet a rare or interesting person. It s more than galling, it s a fucking constant shock. It s making a god-damned grouch out of me. Anybody can be a god-damned grouch and most are. Help!"



"Solitude with God is a place for pregnancy."


"When alone, concentrate on the fruits of the solitude, not on the poisons of it!"


"It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself."


"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."


"There is a magic in walking alone, in thinking alone: If there is no one to contact you around, the universe starts contacting you!"


"I live alone," he said simply. "I live in the open. I hear the waves at night and see the black patterns of the pine boughs against the sky. With sound and silence and color and solitude, of course I see visions. Anyone would.""But you don't believe in them?" Doc asked hopefully."I don't find it a matter for belief or disbelief," the seer said. "You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks into the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself everytime that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it? Don't you see visions?""No," said Doc."



"That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."


"When you want to be alone, even few people around you will seem like a tremendous crowd to you!"


"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."


"He sat beside the window in the dark, with his eyes closed. Hearing to the sound of the rain. The whisky in his glass burnt his throat, while the smoke of his cigarette filled his lungs and the fire inside his heart consumed his soul slowly."



"I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented."


"I went up on the hill and walked about until twilight had deepened into an autumn night with a benediction of starry quietude over it. I was alone but not lonely. I was a queen in halls of fancy."


"We rarely find answers in the distractions. But oh what possibilities live within the quiet of solitude.In my fear to be alone,I distracted myself away from the deep beauty of my own solitude."


"Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows."


"The gift of solo moments is that they are wholly ours. On or off the road, solo moments connect us inward to ourselves with heightened clarity and insight. They also direct our energies out into the world, magnetizing us to new people and experiences we may not have encountered under any other circumstance."


"One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude."


"She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone."


"The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant."


"There is lonely, and there is alone time. I have found that both have etched character upon my soul."


"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."


"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."


"Alone! yesterday, today and forever."



"To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? There is nobody-here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone."


"In these pages, traveling "solo does not necessarily mean "alone. The absence of other people often suggests regretful isolation. "Solo by contrast, is a willful decision to be the architect of our own experience."


"Sometimes solitude is a real heaven for the tired minds and a marvellous sanctuary for the wounded souls!"


"There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."


"All geniuses are peculiarly inclined to solitude, to which they are driven as much by their difference from others as the inner wealth with which they are quipped, since among humans, among diamonds, only the uncommonly great are suited as solitaires: the ordinary ones must be set in clusters to produce any effect."


"Hide in the morrow. No one will look for you there."


"To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all."


"Even in the loneliest momentsi have been therefor myself."


"In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there."


"We learn about life by exploring the texture and depth of space that composes our private inner world. In solitude we revisit our wounded feelings, sins, doubts, and deepest despair, replay poignant memories of loved ones, project what we are becoming, and ascertain the purpose of our being."



"Solitude is a greater treasure than money."



"It is through solitude that you can convert your time into something of value."


"If we are alone, we become more alone. Life is strange."
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