Best 1398 quotes in «solitude quotes» category

We become more devoted to pleasing other people than establishing a relationship with ourselves. We believe we are what we have and what we do and we believe we are what other people think we are. Ego is in many ways the primary cause of most of our misconception and woe.

We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a 
broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest
 ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest 
triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine 
heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or 
saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or 
criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs
of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts
and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment
 seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the 
awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.

we both mistake solitude for safety find comfort in wishing ourselves untouchable you a cloud & i fog daily i remind myself every life must be s e e d e d with fingerprints i say a prayer to an unnameable god the constant motion rotating constellations across a sky that will always be my favorite blue the cactus that has & will continue to bloom every spring of my life & hope it's enough to find you whistling a song only birds sing in morning's memory waiting for me to be present in our living

We born alone,we all die alone.

We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.

We enter this universe alone in search of microscopic beauty—and while we love, or are loved by others—we leave this world completely alone, having only found infinite sorrow. Despite there being so many of us, each of us tragically realizes that everyone is on a solitary journey. No one else can see what we see, hear what we hear, feel, what we feel. All we have of each other are glimpses of moments, whispers of experiences, memories of the past we wish we could make eternal, but in the end, we become a faint memory in the minds of a few good people.

we eat our grief with devotion. fold our breaths. tie them in knots and learn to breathe with our mouths hungry for love. ________ solitude.

We exist in the world of books.

We habitually compare ourselves to others to a debilitating degree, believing our successes can only be captured by how much we've outpaced someone else. We deal in acceptable ideas. We disregard our own capabilities. We waste a lot of time and emotion on what everyone else is doing well or badly, when we should be investing in and celebrating ourselves. And sometimes we simply forget that we like our own company, or that we love things for our own, deeply personal, individualistic reasons. In short, we forget ourselves, and how to be alone.

We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.

We must not only observe but listen to the sound of nature.

We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.

We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.

Wenigstens eine kleine Weile lang mußte ich, jedem Anspruch entrückt, in Frieden mit mir selbst sprechen können, ohne daß irgendjemand mich dabei unterbrach.

We rarely find answers in the distractions. But oh what possibilities live within the quiet of solitude. In my fear to be alone, I distracted myself away from the deep beauty of my own solitude.

We suffer in silence.

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.

We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them.

We will, in truth, spend many of our hours alone with our grief. In the cover of our solitude, we encounter another layer in our apprenticeship with sorrow. Here we are asked to hold an extended vigil with loss in the well of silence, slowly ripening our sorrow into something dense and gifting to the world. Our ability to drop into this interior world and do the difficult work of metabolizing sorrow is dependent on the community that surrounds us. Even when we are alone, it is necessary to feel the tethers of concern and kindness holding us as we step off into the unknown and encounter the wild edge of sorrow.

What an ambiance, and such a pity I'm alone: Candles giving off their glow, gusts of wind and the light tapping of rain on the windowpane - a massage for the mind. And a comforting one, too.

What did I fear, and why? — I, to whom the night had been a more familiar face than that of man — I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!

Whatever problem you have can be solved through solitude.

What happened to Kafka is the same as what happened to me. He withdrew, he went too far into solitude and knew he must have known, you never come back from there.

we used to talk all night and do things alone together and i’ve begun (as a reaction to a feeling) to balance the pleasure of loneliness against the pain of loving you

What if you spent some alone time every morning? Call it prayer. Call it planning. Call it centering. I call it a powerful way to begin the day.

What if you are just destined to get hurt, to be helplessly stuck in a point of time you no longer want to be? Maybe life is all about trying to get up while you fall a little bit deeper in the pits of hell, each time you try not to...

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to. And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?

What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?

What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

What's a rainy day without some delicious coffee-flavoured loneliness?

What she did learn from all the books with something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or home, a day can an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative flights, no plot development, no immersive human dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time. Just his work... and in the end she had the feeling that he done more of that than anyone had any use for.

What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?

What's so magical about solitude? In many fields, it's only when you're alone that you can engage in deliberate practice. This is the key to exceptional achievement.

Whenever his eye or mind seems to stop, he discovers another connection, another bridge to carry him to yet another place, and even in the solitude of his room, the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed, as if it were all suddenly converging in him and happening to hm at once.

When alone, concentrate on the fruits of the solitude, not on the poisons of it!

Whenever one speaks of lonely people one takes too much for granted. One thinks people all know what they're dealing with. No, they do not. They've never seen a lonely person, they've simply hated him without knowing him. They've been his neighbours who've used him up, they were the voices in the next room who tempted him. They roused things up against him, getting them to make a din and drown him out. Children ganged up against him when he was a tender child, and at every stage of his growing up he grew hostile to grown-ups . They tracked him to his hiding-place like an animal of chase and throughout his long youth there was no closed season. And when he didn't allow himself to be worn out so that he got away they yelled about what came forth from him and called it ugly and were suspicious of it. And as he didn't stop they grew more obvious and gobbled up his food and breathed up his air and spat into his poverty so that he himself became disgusted at it. They brought him into disrepute as if he were a contagion and threw stones at him to speed his departure. And they were right to follow their age-old instinct: because he really was their enemy. But then when he didn't look up they had second thoughts. They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him separate himself from them for ever.

Whenever you make up your mind to go into solitude, you must decide first of all what you want to go and do there.

When I am all alone Envy me most, Then my thoughts flutter round me In a glimmering host; Some dressed in silver, Some dressed in white, Each like a taper Blossoming light; Most of them merry, Some of them grave, Each of them lithe As willows that wave; Some bearing violets, Some bearing bay, One with a burning rose Hidden away– When I am all alone Envy me then, For I have better friends Than women and men.

When I was a child, I thought, Casually, that solitude Never needed to be sought. Something everybody had, Like nakedness, it lay at hand, Not specially right or specially wrong, A plentiful and obvious thing Not at all hard to understand. Then, after twenty, it became At once more difficult to get And more desired -- though all the same More undesirable; for what You are alone has, to achieve The rank of fact, to be expressed In terms of others, or it's just A compensating make-believe. Much better stay in company! To love you must have someone else, Giving requires a legatee, Good neighbours need whole parishfuls Of folk to do it on -- in short, Our virtues are all social; if, Deprived of solitude, you chafe, It's clear you're not the virtuous sort. Viciously, then, I lock my door. The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside Ushers in evening rain. Once more Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am." (Best Company)

When the solitude invites you, accept it, because it will make you hear the inner voices that you can never hear in the crowds!

When solitude was a problem, I had no solitude. When it ceased to be a problem I found I already possessed it, and could have possessed it all along.

When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.

When some give you advice, say 'thank you'. Then, you must seek the quietness of your spirit for a reflection and direction.

When you are a child at home alone, you’re afraid someone might come; when you are old and at home alone, you’re afraid no one will come.

When words don't come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing." ~ Strider Marcus Jones, Poet

When your mind is quiet, when your mind is in silence, then the new arrives.

Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean — whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.

When you understand that through the power of conversion in solitude you can become great, so many things you’ve been wasting your time on will no longer interest you. You will even run away from some friends.

When you want to be alone, even few people around you will seem like a tremendous crowd to you!