Quotes from Dale Salwak

In solitude, we may find a new beginning, an opportunity to break old habits. In solitude, we may find increased sensitivity, compassion, and empathy. In solitude, we may find the truth of ourselves, restore our dulled senses, and clarify and reorder our priorities. Above all, in solitude, we may find God, and come to hear that voice.

Nothing could be worse, Thoreau wrote, than to come to the end of life and "discover that I had not lived.

Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence. The invention of printing, technics, compulsory education— nothing has so altered man as this lack of relationship to silence, this fact that silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe. Man who has lost silence has not merely lost one human quality but his whole structure has been changed thereby. — MAX PICARD FRENCH PHILOSOPHER

I got up at sunrise and was happy; I walked, and was happy; I roamed the forests and hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I did nothing, I worked in the garden, I picked the fruit, I helped in the house, and happiness followed me everywhere — happiness which could not be referred to any definite object, but dwelt entirely within myself and which never left me a single instant. — JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU SWISS-BORN ESSAYIST

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. — HENRY DAVID THOREAU AMERICAN NATURALIST

It is not a bad exercise for a man to sit quiet once in a while and watch the workings of his mind and heart and notice how often he can find himself favoring five or six of the seven deadly sins, and especially the first of those sins, which is named pride. — CARL SANDBURG AMERICAN POET

If you wish to grow in your spiritual life, you must not allow yourself to be caught up in the workings of the world; you must find time alone, away from the noise and confusion, away from the allure of power and wealth. — THOMAS À KEMPIS AUGUSTINIAN MONK

Very few of us ever walk in the fields and the woods, not talking or singing songs, but just walking quietly and observing things about us and within ourselves. — J. KRISHNAMURTI INDIAN PHILOSOPHER

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak. — SPINOZA DUTCH PHILOSOPHER

Why do you suppose those moments of solitude offer us such relief ? … Because they give us a chance to simply be ourselves, to enjoy what and where we are, to savor just being. Alone with God, we feel no need to perform, to do. — FRANK BIANCO AMERICAN JOURNALIST/PHOTOGRAPHER

At 11:00 a.m. the launch puts me ashore and I walk up on the ridge overlooking the sea. Even Nature in her harsher aspects in the tropics soothes and heals. I stand and loiter long on the breezy ridge and look north upon the great blue crescent of the sea. I have but one thought, and am glad to be alone with it on the hills. — JOHN BURROUGHS AMERICAN NATURALIST