Quotes About Solitude

Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

de los placeres de un solitario, el más grande es hacer el ridículo sin que nadie lo vea.

The spell of these terrible solitudes ... cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative qualities.

Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own.

He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.

I wish I were not quite so lonely—and so poor. And yet I love both my loneliness and my poverty. The former makes me appreciate the companionship of the wind and rain, while the latter preserves my liver and prevents me wasting time in dancing attendance upon women.

He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody.

He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him—whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries

The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but the memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.

He was never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he felt the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand.

Here, where the world is quiet;Here, where all trouble seemsDead winds' and spent waves' riotIn doubtful dreams of dreams.

O all fair lovers about the world, There is none of you, none, that shall comfort me. My thoughts are as dead things, wrecked and whirled Round and round in a gulf of the sea; And still, through the sound and the straining stream, Through the coil and chafe, they gleam in a dream, The bright fine lips so cruelly curled, And strange swift eyes where the soul sits free.

In a land of sand and ruin and gold There shone one woman, and none but she

Time will come when one's safety lies in ten things: nine of which are in staying aloof from men, and the tenth in staying silent.

Let me alone, and go in search of someone else.

Silence is the garden of thought.

I went outside mournful, and I hit pure air.

ARAH lay on a quilt under a tree. The darkness was all around her, but through the branches she could see one bright star. It was comfortable to look at.

Silence is so steadfast, you know. It is so ample, after all.

With that solitude came the greatest luxuries: the time to read, the opportunity to wander, and the chance to think new thoughts.

Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.

This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache.

She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days.