Solitude Quotes

A hand-rolled cigarette to smoke,Another one bought from the store.If he lights one, his mind's lit upAnother one burns a hole..

~ Sanhita Baruah

I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Caught in the center of a soundless fieldWhile hot inexplicable hours go byWhat trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?You seem to ask.I make a sharp reply,Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explainJust in what jaws you were to suppurate:You may have thought things would come right againIf you could only keep quite still and wait.

~ Philip Larkin

All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming inside her head, or a yogi racked with pain. How she had managed to fool anyone, let alone everyone, mystified her (how obtuse people were!) and, oddly, made her extraordinarily bitter. Because the price of her gift for evasion was to have no one, not one person, who understood how horrible she felt. All the time. Absolutely all the time.

~ Jean Hanff Korelitz

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

~ Jonathan Franzen

His cigarettes helped mark the passage of time, especially on days that seemed all sun and sky...The dependable dwindling of his cigarette supply reassured him that he hadn't been left out here, that eventually he would have to ride into town and things would still be there, that the world hadn't stopped whirling.

~ Claire Vaye Watkins

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

~ Sherman Alexie

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.

~ Steve Goodier

Sometimes, it's important to turn off the noise from the outside world. Sometimes, it's critical to stop the banter even within oneself. Intentional solitude and quiet can make us strong for tomorrow.

~ David Paul Kirkpatrick

Accustomed to motion, he was forced to be still.

~ H.w. Brands

Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.

~ Sherry Turkle

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.

~ Sherry Turkle

Solace of Silencesurreal synapsesof a melancholy dronea dream per chanceshe dared not be alone...

~ Muse

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, 'Prove that you are a good person.' Another voice says, 'You’d better be ashamed of yourself.' There also is a voice that says, 'Nobody really cares about you,' and one that says, 'Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.' But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, 'You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.' That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen.That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us 'my Beloved'.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

Not only did Jesus purposefully enter the wilderness on a regular basis but historically, God seems to prefer meeting with man in these desert regions.

~ Amy Layne Litzelman

Nothing stays forever, nobody does rather. All the things, people will leave you one fine day and you’ll be a wanderer in solitude again. You’ll moan again silently through the process of decaying. All your richness or poornesswas never really of worth. When you were born, you were dead, respiring to cease. You’re a trader, exchanging everything!

~ Nupur Walia

My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that’s worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to?

~ Charlotte Eriksson

I have found no other cure for loneliness than to befriend it.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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

~ John Grogan

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. In the morning, — solitude; said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.

~ George Macdonald

I think there is a difference between aloneness and loneliness. Aloneness is necessary for the soul to thrive - even to come alive. Not loneliness.

~ Steve Goodier

At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

That’s what meditation is all about, to be capable of being alone. And remember, aloneness is not loneliness. Loneliness is the state of the person who cannot live alone; loneliness means you are dependent on the crowd, on the other. Aloneness means you are happy with yourself, you are not dependent on anybody. The moment you are not dependent you are an emperor, you are a god, a goddess. Now you have something to share, you can go into the world.

~ Osho

Quietude is the hermit’s humble tool. An intrepid person might attempt to wring out of him or herself a translucent state of creative consciousness by deliberately cutting oneself off from all outside stimuli. When the exterior world forms a wall of impenetrable silence, in our state of exile we can hear the unique cadence of the subtle mind’s authentic ringtone.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I tend to avoid people who always have something to say … and those who expect me to always have something to say.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an overeating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life...And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us.

~ Ronald Rolheiser

Can you be alone without being lonely? Can you spend time by yourself without craving noise or company of other people? Have you discovered the glory of quiet time spent alone, time spent listening to your soul? Solitude brings with it gifts that come from nowhere else.

~ Steve Goodier

Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once…Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.

~ Peter Matthiessen

Set a daily solitude time for reflection and rethinking.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Solitude is such a potential thing. 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

In order to work with difficult outer circumstances, we need to gather our inner strength. If even ten or twenty minutes of meditation a day helps us to do this, let's go for it!

~ Pema Chödrön

Making good use of our limited time - the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day - is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm.

~ Pema Chödrön

I can be alone without being lonely. In fact, those times of solitude are necessary respite for a beleaguered soul, set upon by the pressures of life. I need to take whatever moments I can to just be still.

~ Steve Goodier

Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

In torment, there was release.In the darkness, there was light.In solitude, there were companions.

~ C.c. Humphreys

So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall through I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without even beholding day.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Sometimes in life, we may have to experience solitude, the baseless accusations of people, the betrayal and misunderstanding of trusted and loyal ones, the great judgments and suggestions of ‘they that know better’, and a moment of a state of double mindedness. But those are also for good, for they are the very things that shape and prepare our mind, body and spirit to face the world and to accomplish our mission with great zeal, tenacity and distinctiveness.

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...

~ Sanhita Baruah