Best 1398 quotes in «solitude quotes» category

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

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

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 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 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 always an eternal mystery around the lonely souls!

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

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 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.

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

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

There was something lacking – in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.

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

The rhythm of solitude, once so intimidating, began to feel comfortable. Aloneness, I was learning, does not have to equal loneliness.

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

The sacredness of solitude is spiritualty

The science of decorating time with harmony and art that will leave a mark to be forever embraced by philosophers of every century is the penultimate of a man's inner peace and eternal happiness.

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)]

These words filled me with a sort of melancholy and I was at a loss for an answer, for I felt when I was with him, when I was talking to him - and no doubt it would have been the same with anyone else - none of that happiness which it was possible for me to experience when I was by myself. Alone, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other ot those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of well-being. But as soon as I was with someone else, as soon as I was talking to a friend, my mind as it were faced about, it was towards this interlocutor and not towards myself that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward course they brought me no pleasure.

These young people amaze me; drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If you ask them what they did yesterday, they don't get flustered; they tell you all about it in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd start stammering. It's true that for a long time now nobody has bothered how I spend my time. When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story : plausibility disappears at the same time as friends.

These solitary ones who are free in spirit know thatin one thing or another they must constantly put on an appearance that is different from the way they think; although they want nothing but truth and honesty, they are entangled in a web of misunderstandings. And despite their keen desire, they cannot prevent a fog of false opinions, of accommodation, of halfway concessions, of indulgent silence, of erroneous interpretation from settling on everything they do. And so a cloud of melancholy gathers around their brow, for such natures hate the necessity of appearances more than death, and their persistent bitterness about this makes them volatile and menacing. From time to time they take revenge for their violent selfconcealment, for their coerced constraint. They emerge from their caves with horrible expressions on their faces; at such times their words and deeds are explosions, and it is even possible for them to destroy themselves.

The sight of the wall of water outside reassured me, giving me the idea that it made very little difference whether I stayed with her, or set out alone on my journey that had neither visible starting point nor destination. It didn't matter: since, however closely I became involved with another existence, my own world would always remain secret, inaccessible and shut-off; nobody would ever see me, except as a dim, changeable, wavering shadow, through its impenetrable, semi-opaque walls.

The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the facts of one's experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of the round horizon.

...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

The soul-sacred strength is calmness and confidence.

The soul that knows suffering, understand the grace of solitude.

The solitary speaks."One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being.

The solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad: the mind stagnates for want of employment, grows morbid, and is extinguished like a candle in foul air.

The sound of darkness was certainly intricately linked to the sense of being alone but unrelated to this was the sound of the palpitations of men and women experiencing the sense of utter solitude. There was no doubt about it. This was a sound audible only on evenings such as this.

The sweetness of adversity: we develop the sanity of solitude.

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.

The time of solitude is actually an opportunity to make time work for you.

The true walker may not ask much from his pastime; but he is often surprise at the richness of the gifts which he receives. What he desires when he starts upon his walk he seldom contemplates, yet the heart yearns for a renewal of some experience, although he would not think of giving it utterance. It is with the open mind and heart that he sets out to receive whatever phantasies may come his way, hoping at the back of his mind, it may be, that some measure at least of the fuller revelation of the wonderful and mysterious in nature may come within the power of his assimilation, and lured on in the hope that answers may come to his questionings, in the spirit of the wind upon the hill-tops and in the solitude of sequestered vales; and returning with the wealth of a quiet mind and a peaceful heart, and a certain assurance that holds within it sufficient longing to send him forth again when the time arrives

The things I know, every man can know, but, oh, my heart is mine alone!

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.

The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.