Solitary Quotes - Page 11

• Get a single, solitary thought in your mind, and that thought - the precious love of Jesus. Go and live it out, and come what may, you will be respected though abused. They may say you are an enthusiast, a fanatic, a fool, but those names from the world are titles of praise and glory. The world does not take the trouble to nickname a man unless he is worth it. It will not give you any censure unless it trembles at you.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Jesus, Men, Names

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• It appears to be among the laws of nature, that the mighty of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the solitary flight of one great bird is followed by the twittering petulance of many smaller.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Greatness, Law, Bird

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans”, p.166

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• I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

  John Fowles

  Girl, Sex, Loneliness

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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• Solitary confinement has been used extensively, it always has. I was in prison for 44 years; it was a normal part of life - the practice of it. They put you in solitary confinement for disciplinary reasons, they put you in solitary confinement to protect you from violence or whatever, and they also put you in solitary confinement just to show you who has got the power ... It's not something new; it's just something that nobody really cared about in the past.

  Wilbert Rideau

  Past, Years, Practice

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• What a position of transcendent horror must that be, where the perpetrator of a great crime, till then a stranger to positive guilt, finds himself suddenly cut off, and forever, from all human sympathy, isolated from hope, the tenant of a solitary cell, and with a wide, impassable gulf yawning between him and that great brotherhood of which he has ceased to be a part--no longer regarded as a man, but as a monster in the shape of one, from whom Mercy herself turns away, and for whom Pity even has no tears!

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Cutting, Men, Yawning

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• A grateful loving heart carries with it, under every parallel of latitude, the warmth and light of the tropics. It plants its Eden in the wilderness and solitary place, and sows with flowers the gray desolation of rock and mosses.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Gratitude, Flower, Grateful

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• The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Loneliness, Men, Suffering

  Emile M. Cioran (1975). “A short history of decay”, Viking Books

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• Christian society is like a bundle of sticks laid together, whereof one kindles another. Solitary men have fewest provocations to evil, but, again, fewest incitations to good. So much as doing good is better than not doing evil will I account Christian good-fellowship better than an hermitish and melancholy solitariness.

  Joseph Hall

  Christian, Men, Evil

  Joseph Hall, Josiah Pratt (1808). “The Works: Now First Collected : with Some Account of His Life and Sufferings. Devotional works”, p.21

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• I love all waste and solitary places.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Solitude, Waste

  'Julian and Maddalo' (1818) l. 14

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• A smoke in times of rest is a great companion to the solitary soldier.

  Che Guevara

  Soldier, Companion, Smoke

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• Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually cultivates it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.

  M. Scott Peck

  Spiritual, Loss, Journey

  M. Scott Peck (2003). “The Road Less Traveled, Timeless Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth”, Touchstone

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• Flyfishing does have its social aspects - on some of our crowded trout streams it can get too social - but esentially it's a solitary, contemplative sport. People are left alone with themselves in beautiful surroundings to try to accomplish something that seems to have genuine value.

  John Gierach

  Beautiful, Sports, Sea

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• I was drawn to be very solitary as a scholar. I lived a very quiet life, aloof, with my books, with my walks in nature, meditating, and of course with my teacher.

  Frederick Lenz

  Teacher, Book, Rama

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• Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California

  Joaquin Miller

  Lonely, Heart, Winter

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• I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Depression, Exercise, Night

  Edgar Allan Poe (2006). “The Portable Edgar Allan Poe”, p.488, Penguin

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• [He] would drive his sculling boat through mile after mile, in a silent brutal programe of conditioning - he would work all alone, at first light, punishing himself without mercy. His was the private dignity of the lone athlete, with a grim purpose, fighting a solitary war with himself, toward a goal only he can see.

  Daniel Topolski

  War, Athlete, Fighting

  Daniel Topolski, Patrick Robinson (2013). “True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny”, p.32, Random House

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• I am often asked if I am not lonely on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer.

  John Muir

  Beautiful, Lonely, Self

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• A Light exists in Spring
  Not present on the Year
  At any other period -
  When March is scarcely here
  A Color stands abroad
  On Solitary Fields
  That Science cannot overtake
  But Human Nature feels.
  
  It waits upon the Lawn,
  It shows the furthest Tree
  Upon the furthest Slope you know
  It almost speaks to you.
  
  Then as Horizons step
  Or Noons report away
  Without the Formula of sound
  It passes and we stay -
  
  A quality of loss
  Affecting our Content
  As Trade had suddenly encroached
  Upon a Sacrament.

  Emily Dickinson

  Spring, Loss, Color

  Emily Dickinson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Emily Dickinson (Illustrated)”, p.1084, Delphi Classics

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• A color stands abroad on solitary hills that silence cannot overtake, but human nature feels.

  Emily Dickinson

  Color, Silence, Hills

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• He [Zampano] probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angels of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.

  Mark Z. Danielewski

  Believe, Angel, Sacrifice

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• The solitary monk who shook the world
  From pagan slumber, when the gospel trump
  Thunder' d its challenge from his dauntless lips
  In peals of truth.

  Robert Montgomery

  Challenges, Religion, Lips

  Robert Montgomery (1854). “The Poetical Works of Robert Montgomery ...”, p.186

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• The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

  Virginia Woolf

  Twilight, Moving, Knitting

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.56, Broadview Press

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• A solitary American monk named Thomas Berry writes that in our relationship to nature, we have been autistic for centuries. Wrapped tightly in our own version of knowledge, we have been unreceptive to the wisdom of the natural world. To tune in again, to have the "spontaneous environmental rapport" that characterized our ancestors, will take doing something that is perfectly delightful: reimmersing ourselves in the natural world.

  Janine Benyus

  Nature, Writing, Animal

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• Well, it's true that I've never been solitary, although I spend a lot of time alone. I've never felt lonely or been shy.

  Richard E. Grant

  Lonely, Shy, Alone Time

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• Doing my art came out of something very solitary and something that I had no intention of showing anybody, and yet once people saw pieces in my house, it became really clear that there was a great demand for my art.

  Paul Stanley

  Art, People, House

  "14 Questions With Paul Stanley". Interview with Shawn Loeffler, www.askmen.com.

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