Solitary Quotes - Page 7

• I cannot love evergreens - they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind - sympathy. ... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together - no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Spring, Autumn, Cutting

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1834). “Francesca Carrara”, p.50

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• I found the best ideas usually came, not when one was actively striving for them, but when one was in a more relaxed state… I used to take long solitary walks on Sundays, during which I tended to review the current situation in a leisurely way. Such occasions often proved fruitful, even though (or perhaps, because) the primary purpose of the walk was relaxation and not research.

  Paul Dirac

  Sunday, Ideas, Long

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• There must be a solemn and terrible aloneness that comes over the child as he takes those first independent steps. All this is lost to memory and we can only reconstruct it through analogies in later life....To the child who takes his first steps and finds himself walking alone, this moment must bring the first sharp sense of the uniqueness and separateness of his body and his person, the discovery of the solitary self.

  Selma Fraiberg

  Children, Memories, Independent

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• The essence of modernity is that progress no longer waits on genius; instead we have learned to put our faith in the organized efforts of ordinary men. Science is as old as the race, but the effective organization of science is new. Ancient science, like placer mining, was a pursuit of solitary prospectors. Nuggets of truth were found, but the total wealth of knowledge increased slowly. Modern man began to transform this world when he began to mine the hidden veins of knowledge systematically.

  William Wickenden

  Faith, Men, Essence

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• That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Heart, People, Beginners

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• Novel writing is solitary work.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Writing, Novel, Novel Writing

  Mohsin Hamid (2015). “Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London”, p.59, Penguin

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• The actual breakthrough in the privacy of the studio, when one dares to apply paint in a new manner, is a solitary thrill, dependent upon no one else.

  Mary Carroll Nelson

  Thrill, Originality, Privacy

  Mary Carroll Nelson, Beth Ames Swartz (1984). “Connecting: the art of Beth Ames Swartz”, Northland Pub

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• And angling too, that solitary vice, What Izaak Walton sings or says: The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.

  Lord Byron

  Should Have, Fishing, Vices

  Lord Byron (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron (Illustrated)”, p.2252, Delphi Classics

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• Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Reading, Solitary Life, Voice

  Interview with Juliette Lewis, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 24, 2011.

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• The spiritual journey is one that we must take "alone together," in the same way that a good marriage involves a dance between solitude and communion. The life of the spirit entails a continuous alternation between retreating into oneself and going out into the world: it's an inward-outward journey. There is a solitary part to it, but that solitude helps us to develop richer and more in-depth relationships with our friends, our children, our community, and the political world.

  Sam Keen

  Spiritual, Children, Journey

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• Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Children, Childhood, Reimagining

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• A solitary ascetic is a symbol of the most cowardly egotism; a hermit who flees from his brothers instead of helping them to carry the burden of life, to work for others, and to put their shoulders to the wheel of social life, is a coward who hides himself when the battle is on, and goes to sleep drunk on an opiate.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Brother, Sleep, Burdens Of Life

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• There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born. It is serene. Empty. Solitary. Unchanging. Infinite. Eternally present. It is the mother of the universe. For lack of a better name, I call it the Tao. It flows through all things, inside and outside, and returns to the origin of all things. The Tao is great. The universe is great. Earth is great. Man is great. These are the four great powers. Man follows the earth. Earth follows the universe. The universe follows the Tao. The Tao follows only itself.

  Laozi

  Mother, Men, Names

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• [Having] appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ...Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe ...and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view-i.e., in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomized, soulless, and self-destructive.

  Richard Tarnas

  Men, Self, Views

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• An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.

  Ruth Benedict

  Example, Generations, Culture

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• The idea of the solitary hero can be quite an unhealthy one, and we need to pool our efforts and be heroic together!

  Rob Hopkins

  Hero, Ideas, Effort

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• Ivan Lendl is a robot, a solitary, mechanical man who lives with his dogs behind towering walls at his estate in Connecticut. A man who so badly wants to have a more human image that he's having surgery to remove the bolts from his neck.

  Tony Kornheiser

  Dog, Wall, Men

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• Ah! Wretched and too solitary he who loves not his own company.

  Abraham Cowley

  Life, Company, Wretched

  Abraham Cowley, Thomas Sprat (1826). “Prose works of Abraham Cowley ; including his essays in prose and verse”, p.134

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• Now warm in love, now with'ring in my bloom Lost in a convent's solitary gloom!

  Alexander Pope

  Love, Losing, Lost

  Alexander Pope, John Wilson Croker (1871). “The Works: Including Several Hundred Unpublished Letters, and Other New Materials”, p.239

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• Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take care of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.

  Samuel Johnson

  Life, Struggle, Men

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (letter to Lord Chesterfield, 7 Feb. 1755)

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• The happiness of being envied is glamour.
  Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

  John Berger

  Envy, Reassurance, Illusion

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• Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship, Country, Men

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• Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

  David Brooks

  Creativity, Ideas, People

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• In mature years I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life. To be marooned, to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in imagination.  A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.

  Edmund Gosse

  Air, Cells, Oxygen

  "Father and Son".

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• A holy life is not an ascetic, or gloomy or solitary life, but a life regulated by divine truth and faithful in Christian duty. It is living above the world while we are still in it.

  Tryon Edwards

  Christian, Solitary Life, Faithful

  Tryon Edwards (2015). “The New Dictionary of Thoughts”, p.588, Ravenio Books

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