Best 1398 quotes in «solitude quotes» category

The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.

The importance of solitude is to help you to differentiate your own thoughts from those you have studied, read, heard, or unintentionally absorbed.

The ingenious person will above all strive for freedom from pain and annoyance, for tranquility and leisure, and consequently seek a quiet, modest life, as undisturbed as possible, and accordingly, after some acquaintance with so-called human beings, choose seclusion and, if in possession of a great mind, even solitude. For the more somebody has in himself, the less he needs from the outside and the less others can be to him. Therefore, intellectual distinction leads to unsociability.

Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all.

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shadows if they wanted to. What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? When solitude was banished, did one become more oneself, or less? Did the crowd enhance one's selfhood or erase it?

The longing for solitude is a deeply romantic passion. But then writing is a romantic thing to do, predicated on desire, urgency, and an ideal of human connection, hardly available in what we wistfully call real life.

The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.

The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.

The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant.

The most perfect solitude must entail the absence of all beings, but it must also tremble with the light of life. For example, a perfect solitude may find itself haunted by lives born of the imagination, characters lying on shelves in rows of books, or accompanied by figures waiting in dreams. The perfect solitude pushes one to sense the pulse of solitude itself; for example, a perfect solitude may be marked with the beat of one’s heart.

...the natures of solitary people are apt to have more unmapped country in them than worldly folk imagine. They see and think and do things peculiar to themselves, and one may turn up buried treasure in them at any moment. ("Absolute Evil")

The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.

The person who knows how to enjoy their own company knows the best thing.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

The person who knows how to enjoy their own company knows the most important thing.

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.

The pleasure of reading is the greatest solitude.

The quest for freedom in the real world is like living in a room with many windows. You can connect with the outside atmosphere whenever you want to, by opening the windows and when you seek privacy or solitude, you can close them.

The power of imagination is strongest in the place of solitude.

The quiet wasn't so lonely if you listened to how much sound was hidden in silence.

The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn.

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.

There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.

There are no secrets here. Everybody knows everything about everybody. Or they would like to think they do. Secrets have to be well guarded, and the price is high.

There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries. The epistolary novel expresses love in a beautiful emulation of images and metaphors. To tell a love, one must write. One never writes too much. How many lovers, upon returning home from the tenderest of rendezvous, open their writing desks! Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed. The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving. A realist passion will see nothing there but evanescent formulas. But just the same it is no less true that great passions are prepared by great reveries. The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness.

There are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin.

There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.

There are times i wish i was a master magician so i could disappear into the folds of time, without consequence, without missing a beat. As an introvert, i need so much time to myself. I feel expansive and peaceful in my own space, constricted and chained, when confined to social situations. I can't blossom when pressed against everyone else.

T]here arises an insight, which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.

the rebels of 1905, at the frontier on which they stand united, teach us, to the sound of exploding bombs, that rebellion cannot lead, without ceasing to be rebellion, to consolation and to the comforts of dogma. Their only evident victory is to triumph at least over solitude and negation. In the midst of a world which they deny and which rejects them, they try, man after man, like all the great-hearted ones, to reconstruct a brotherhood of man. The love they bear for one another, which brings them happiness even in the desert of a prison, which extends to the great mass of their enslaved and silent fellow men, gives the measure of their distress and of their hopes. To serve this love, they must first kill; to inaugurate the reign of innocence, they must accept a certain culpability. This contradiction will be resolved for them only at the very last moment. Solitude and chivalry, renunciation and hope will only be surmounted by the willing acceptance of death.

There is always an eternal mystery around the lonely souls!

There is a charm in Solitude that cheers A feeling that the world knows nothing of A green delight the wounded mind endears After the hustling world is broken off

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more

There is a predictable interlude when the rivals suddenly come together and speak for a second of their common loneliness, thus tritely demonstrating that we really are all the same, though I can't think of any really first-rate film, play, or book that isn't unconsciously dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably different.

There is no greater companion like books.

There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring.

There is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd.

There is sadness and then there is happiness. Happiness does not normally make its prescence felt. You have to go deep and feel the true happiness inside your own heart. Happiness can be our solitude, our loineliness, or a few good friends. You must find your happiness and protect your happiness!

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

There's something very enticing about an empty bench under a tree. And if it's facing a river, that's the bench for me.

There's great power in not fearing solitude. You don't allow yourself to be treated like crap because you're afraid of the alternative.

There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe.

There was a large crowd around us, and every face in it looked happy. We had little opportunity to talk until we reached the woods, where there were no flowers and no people.

There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,' Knight said.

There was a solace in a snow-laden forest wrapped in night found nowhere else, a loneliness that made me better acquainted with myself.

There was one novel above all others, Knight said, that sparked in him the rare and unnerving sensation that writer was reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. "I recognize myself in the main character," he said, referring to the angry and misanthropic narrator, who has lived apart form all others for about twenty years. The book's opening lines are: "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man I am an unattractive man." Knight also expressed no shortage of self-loathing, but it was offset by a fierce pride, as well as an occasional trace of superiority. So, too, with the unnamed narrator of Underground . On the final page of the book, the narrator drops all humbleness and says what he feels: "I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom." [Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952) (dissenting)]

There will be times of noise and there will be times of silence, both are necessary to hear your soul.

the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.