Solitude Quotes - Page 36

• Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.

  Tahir Shah

  Real, Loneliness, Home

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• The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Life, Dream, Passion

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• Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Nature, Thinking

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• Virtue could see to do what virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all-to ruffled, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i' th' centre and enjoy bright day; But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the midday sun.

  John Milton

  Sweet, Dark, Moon

  'Comus' (1637) l. 373

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• There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

  George Eliot

  Wisdom, Lying, Cutting

  George Eliot (2016). “The Lifted Veil”, p.23, George Eliot

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• Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings.

  Alberto Santos-Dumont

  Dog, Children, Moving

  Alberto Santos-Dumont, (2013). “My Air-Ships”, p.24, Read Books Ltd

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• How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Communication, Childhood

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• A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Memories, Drama

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• Boys need to learn the value of spiritual solitude. For the soul to grow, it needs those moments of no-stimulation, of wakeful peace. Because we adults don't usually practice enough solitude—because we are always 'doing' things—we often neglect to teach our boys to find solitude

  Michael Gurian

  Spiritual, Boys, Practice

  Michael Gurian (2006). “The Wonder of Boys”, p.202, Penguin

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• As our lives speed up more and more, so do our children's. We forget and thus they forget that there is nothing more important than the present moment. We forget and thus they forget to relax, to find spiritual solitude, to let go of the past, to quiet ambition, to fully enjoy the eating of a strawberry, the scent of a rose, the touch of a hand on a cheek...

  Michael Gurian

  Letting Go, Spiritual, Children

  Michael Gurian (2006). “The Wonder of Boys”, p.199, Penguin

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• Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.

  James Salter

  Benefits, Difficult, Stills

  James Salter (1995). “A Sport and a Pastime”

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• Silence and solitude are confrontational. They plunge us instantly into the truth.

  Barbara De Angelis

  Silence, Serious, Plunge

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• Solitude is considered un-American.

  Erica Jong

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• I didn't choose solitude.

  Klaus Kinski

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• It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

  Russell Banks

  Reality, Years, Checks

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• I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.

  Michael Chabon

  Thinking, Fortresses

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• Hours of solitude, hours of creation, hours of meditation. Solitude and meditation gave me an awareness, a perspective which I have never lost: that of solidarity with the rest of mankind.

  Vicente Aleixandre

  Perspective, Meditation, Awareness

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• If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  Children, Quality, World

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2007). “Outdoor Studies, Poems”, p.245, Reprint Services Corporation

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• In a cool solitude of trees Where leaves and birds a music spin, Mind that was weary is at ease, New rhythms in the soul begin.

  William Kean Seymour

  Bird, Tree, Soul

  William Kean Seymour (1946). “Collected Poems”

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• Maybe love won't let you down. All of your failures are training grounds and just as your back's turned, you'll be surprised... as your solitude subsides.

  Jenny Lewis

  Failure, Training, Maybe Love

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• Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.

  E. M. Forster

  Real, Journey, Soul

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• For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.

  Virginia Woolf

  Thinking, Needs, Silent

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.58, Tyché

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• When you feel the desire for power, you should stay in solitude for some time

  Leo Tolstoy

  Inspirational, Desire, Should

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• Happiness is not to be sought in solitude or in busy centers. It is in the Self.

  Ramana Maharshi

  Gratitude, Self, Busy

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• Now therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former opinions.

  Rene Descartes

  Peaceful, Mind, Care

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