quotations about solitude
We're afraid of solitude because we're afraid of the feelings that will rise before we can be at ease, afraid to confront who we are when stripped of our "doing" nature. We feel a need to be surrounded by people, by activity; to entrain with another's rhythm -- anything but solitude ... Solitude takes practice. It requires facing down loneliness and realizing that there is nothing more important you can do. Far from being an indulgence, quiet contemplation -- "doing nothing" -- is as restorative as an elixir.
STEPHAN RECHTSCHAFFEN
Timeshifting: Creating More Time to Enjoy Your Life
Dawn breaks, I am alone
I'm awake, eyes unopened
Half in the dark, half in the room
Half in the light sealed by your womb
Sail soon my eyes out in the dark
Oceans of sighs, adrift in her bark
Islands lay scattered, island won't talk
Life hardly matters here in the dark
I want you in solitude
I need you in solitude
THREE FISH
"Solitude"
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
Driftin' Dreamin'
In an Azure mood,
Stardust gleamin'
Thru my solitude:
Here in my seclusion,
You're a blue illusion
While I'm in this Azure interlude.
ELLA FITZGERALD
"Azure"
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
HERMANN HESSE
Steppenwolf
Are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert; or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone?
CHARLES LAMB
"Estimate of De Foe's Secondary Novels", The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb: Miscellaneous prose, 1798-1834
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The Waves
A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile. Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of someday meeting yourself again.
EMIL CIORAN
"Strangled Thoughts", The New Gods
The value of solitude -- one of it's values -- is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within.
MAY SARTON
Journal of a Solitude
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing
It is known to many that we need solitude to find ourselves. Perhaps it is not so well known that we need solitude to find our fellows.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Selected Essays
Aloneness is inevitable in being human. People cannot accept this. They should be aware of it and use it. It heightens your perceptions.
EDWARD ALBEE
The Daily Mail, 1969
If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Essays in Aesthetics
In solitude there grows what anyone brings into it, the inner beast too. Therefore solitude is inadvisable to many.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition.
AMELIA E. BARR
All the Days of My Life
Solitude is connected to the experience of wonder. It inspires humility. And it opens the door to reflection and insight.
ANDREW FIALA
"In today's crowded world, even Yosemite in summer can't provide necessary solitude", Fresno Bee, July 21, 2017
In my solitude you haunt me
With reveries of days gone by
In my solitude you taunt me
With memories that never die
ELLA FITZGERALD
"Solitude"
Solitude sometimes is
Life that no longer exists
Solitude sometimes is
When there's nothing left to give
MANIC STREET PREACHERS
"Solitude Sometimes Is"