Solitude Quotes - Page 34

• Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth.

  Khalil Gibran

  Music, Heart, Roots

  Khalil Gibran “The New Frontier and Sand and Foam”, Library of Alexandria

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• St. John of the Cross points out that the divine music can best be heard in solitude and silence. The sonorous music is not a physical sound that vibrates the eardrum but something transcending the senses. Physical solitude and silence remove the distracting noises that prevent us from hearing on deeper levels.

  Charles Cumming

  Music, Silence, Listening

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• To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it.

  Thomas McGuane

  Spiritual, Distance, Views

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• Oh blessed a thousand times the peasant who is born, eats and dies without anybody bothering about his affairs.

  Giuseppe Verdi

  Blessed, Affair, Born

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• The cure for too much to do is solitude and silence.

  Ken Blanchard

  Silence, Too Much, Cures

  Ken Blanchard (2010). “The Heart of a Leader”, p.84, David C Cook

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• Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Civilization, Going Out, World

  "Of God and Men". Book by Aiden Wilson Tozer, 1960.

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• Even as people take pride in their national independence, we know we are becoming more and more interdependent." Bill Clinton "The price for independence is often isolation and solitude.

  Steve Schmidt

  Pride, People, Independence

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• Decisive moment: the one when you will be really alone. And it is perhaps this that makes her hesitate: not the void, but the vastness of the solitude. It's as well if you are frightened of solitude. It's a sign that you have come to the moment of your birth.

  Helene Cixous

  Vastness, Void, Birth

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• Find a day for yourself-better yet, late at night. Go to the forest or to the field, or lock yourself in a room ... You will meet solitude there. There you will be able to listen attentively to the noise of the wind first, to birds singing, to see wonderful nature and to notice yourself in it ... and to come back to harmonic connection with the world and its Creator.

  Nachman of Breslov

  Night, Wind, Bird

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• Seclusion is the price of greatness.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Wisdom, Greatness, Feeling Lonely

  Yogananda (Paramahansa) (1966). “Self-realization Magazine”

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• Everybody likes to see the loner hitched. It tells them everything is right with the world.

  Philip O Ceallaigh

  Loner, World, Likes

  Philip Ó Ceallaigh (2006). “Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse”

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• What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you.

  Charles Baxter

  Mistake, Voice, Care

  Charles Baxter (2009). “The Feast of Love”, p.87, Vintage

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• What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Children, Able, Hours

  "Letters to a Young Poet". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 6, 1929.

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• I like people. I like watching them. It's just that I'd prefer to do it from a mile away using very powerful binoculars.

  Geraldine McCaughrean

  Powerful, People, Miles

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• I am not a joiner. Somewhere I once said that people join clubs now for the very reason they once carried them, a need for security. Maybe I'm alone more often than I should be, because I try to find security within myself.

  Rod McKuen

  People, Trying, Needs

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• [Kierkegaard] did not care for large public events because every crowd is in itself an untruth. The only way out is isolation, aloofness. Only the individual is a reality and only the individual is true. Maybe the process of isolation in an individual is one of the most important matters that exists. Is not the whole point of this world for people to separate and become individuals?

  Mati Unt

  Reality, People, Important

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• Every so often a disappearance is in order. A vanishing. A checking out. An indeterminate period of unavailability. Each person, each sane person, maintains a refuge, or series of refuges, for this purpose. A place, or places, where they can, figuratively if not literally, suspend their membership in the human race.

  John Murray

  Race, Order, Purpose

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• I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure.

  Fleur Adcock

  Writing, Feelings, Nerves

  Fleur Adcock (2000). “Poems 1960-2000”, Bloodaxe Books Limited

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• I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone else. Some people would be better off alone, but they feel they've got to get hold of someone to prove they're worthwhile.

  Liv Ullmann

  Lonely, Thinking, People

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• I prize the privilege of being alone.

  Carl Rogers

  Privilege, Prize

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date we dream of going home to watch television. We would prefer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit. We are almost constitutionally incapable of casual relationships.

  Sasha Cagen

  Dream, Home, Mean

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• One of the many advantages of being a loner is that often there's time to think, ponder, brood, meditate deeply, and figure things out to one's satisfaction.

  Andrea Seigel

  Wisdom, Thinking, Feeling Lonely

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• Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
  Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
  The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
  The costly aversion of the eyes from death-
  Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

  Philip Larkin

  Running, Eye, Desire

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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• If a woman is to know herself, then periods of solitude should be courted, planned, and embraced.

  Mary Blakely

  Should, Periods, Knows

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• Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, enthusiasm is the true part of genius.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Nurse, Genius, Enthusiasm

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