Solitude Quotes - Page 33

• We in the "developed" world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Western culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range.

  Joan Halifax

  Our World, Symphony, Silence

  Joan Halifax (2007). “The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom”, p.38, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

  Will Self

  Healthy, Appetite, Ifs

  Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. May 9, 2007.

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• I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

  Edmund Burke

  Simple, Reality, Views

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• Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  New York, Men, Doors

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1970). “The Works of Thomas Bailey Aldrich: Ponkapog papers. A sea turn, and other matters”

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• In the circle of light on the state in the midst of darkness, you have the sensation of being entirely alone... This is called solitude in public... During a performance, before an audience of thousands, you can always enclose yourself in this circle, like a snail in its shell... You can carry it wherever you go.

  Constantin Stanislavski

  Light, Circles, Darkness

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• The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

  Gilles Deleuze

  People, Silence, Relief

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• Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Taken, Imagination, Mind

  Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt (2001). “The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers”, p.148, Stanford University Press

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• I've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.

  Judith Jamison

  Fall, Opposites, Soul

  Judith Jamison (1993). “Dancing Spirit: An Autobiography”, Doubleday Books

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• When we begin to look around us, to observe individuals and societies, and to study philosophies and religions, we realize that our loneliness is shared. Our solitude is plural, and our singularity is the similarity between us.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Philosophy, Loneliness, Looks

  Tariq Ramadan (2010). “The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism”, p.54, Penguin UK

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• Solitude is a catalyst for innovation

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Innovation, Catalyst

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• The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Voice, Doe, Whispering

  "The Book of Delusions". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1936.

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• Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Sin, Purity, Share

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

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• Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Love Is, Heaven, Sublime

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

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• The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Mean, Sole, Those You Love

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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• Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.

  Philip Larkin

  Art, Suicidal, Thinking

  Philip Larkin (2012). “Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica”, Faber & Faber

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• The world is full of noise. Might we not set ourselves to learn silence, stillness solitude?

  Elisabeth Elliot

  Christian, Silence, World

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• Self-reliance can turn a salesman into a merchant; a politician into a statesman; an attorney into a jurist; an unknown youth into a great leader. All are to be tomorrow's big leaders - those who in solitude sit above the clang and dust of time, with the world's secret trembling on their lips.

  Newell Dwight Hillis

  Leadership, Self, Dust

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• Solitude is creativity's best friend, and solitude is refreshment for our souls.

  Naomi Judd

  Friendship, Creativity, Soul

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• We never touch but at points.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1964). “The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.279, Harvard University Press

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• The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.

  Thornton Wilder

  Leadership, Order, Issues

  Thornton Wilder (1987). “The ides of March”, HarperCollins

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• The use of knowledge in our sex (beside the amusement of solitude) is to moderate the passions and learn to be contented with a small expense, which are the certain effects of a studious life and, it may be, preferable even to that fame which men have engrossed to themselves and will not suffer us to share.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Sex, Passion, Knowledge

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1825). “The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Including Her Correspondence, Poems, and Essays, Form Her Genuine Papers”, p.375

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• Everyone is lonely sometimes, even married people. But most single women (as well as women with spouses) actually enjoy their solitude.

  Sarah Mahoney

  Single, Lonely, People

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• Solitude is happiness for one who is content, who has heard the Dhamma and clearly sees. Non-affliction is happiness in the world - harmlessness towards all living beings.

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Buddhism, World

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• One way leads to acquisition, the other leads to nirvana. Realising this a monk should take no pleasure in the respect of others, but should devote himself to solitude.

  Gautama Buddha

  Humility, Pride, Acquisition

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• In wilderness people can find the silence and the solitude and the noncivilized surroundings that can connect them once again to their evolutionary heritage, and through an experience of the eternal mystery, can give them a sense of the sacredness of all creation.

  Sigurd F. Olson

  Music, Giving, People

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