Quotes About Solitude

To know a mountain, you must sleep on it. —Tom Longstaff, This My Voyage

As climbers thronged the scope of Everest, the Rupal Face retained its solitude, remaining a formidable oabjective.

Not even when it had my name did I really think about what it would be like to pass days and months and years in those boxes, to be on the other side of the treatment,

Even toward the middle of the century, there were occasions when the London mailbag for Edinburgh was found to contain only a single letter.

The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains.

He remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had - a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.

I can only give them my first log, with birds, sea, daily sights and little everyday problems. My real log is written in the sea and sky; it can't be photographed and given to others. It has gradually come to life out of all that has surrounded us for months: the sounds of water on the hull, the sounds of wind gliding on the sails, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk. 1

I spend my time reading, sleeping, eating. The good, quiet life, with nothing to do. And little by little the water tank fills up.

If I do have to sight land, I like it to be from as far off as possible.

Je prends le globe du Damien et regarde longuement l'immense boucle tracée depuis le départ. Plymouth si près, dix mille milles à peine vers le nord… mais partir de Plymouth pour rentrer à Plymouth, c'est devenu au fil du temps comme partir de nulle part pour aller nulle part. C'est formidable, ce petit globe que je tiens dans mes mains ! Et nous sommes seuls, mon bateau et moi. Seuls avec la mer immense pour nous tout seuls.

I felt such a need to rediscover the wind of the high sea, nothing else counted at that moment, neither earth nor men. All Joshua and I wanted was to be left alone with ourselves. Any other thing did not exist, had never existed. You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that's all, and it is as simple as a ray of sunshine, as normal as the blue of the sky.

Solitary walking forces us to confront ourselves, freeing us from the limitations of the body as well as those of our usual environment that restrict us to conventional, acceptable, and prepackaged ways of thinking.

They knew that Pascal's room, Thoreau's hut, and especially their own den was a dark chamber, an unhealthy space full of resentment; they knew that one is nothing when alone, that one thinks most often of nothing at all, and that hell is not other people, but the self.

he never fails to amuse her, never fails to be there for her when she wants him, to love her as she wants to be loved, to leave her alone when she needs solitude

She came home from work to the noise of fellow youngsters having fun through the partition walls Exacerbating her aloneness Yet she knew this was exactly what she needed Solititude To register what she was feeling Forcing herself to become deaf to all sound except her own

How long the night seems to one kept awake by pain.

If you stuffed a ship full to bursting point with human bodies, there would be such loneliness that they would all freeze.

When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think.

Religion should be a personal and private thing between a soul and God.

Mrs MacFarley called the valley the Glen. She called the light at early evening the gloaming. She liked to go Roaming in the Gloaming in the Glen.

When I'm alone in nature as I am now, I marvel that I ever let a day go by when I'm not in nature as I am now. But the truth is, not only days but whole months go by between immersions. How can that be, when I feel so recharged here?

Were there language, I'd be my own lone letter.

It should be said that I love best the early-morning hours when my thoughts are my own. I love the scratched-glass bubble of a solo train ride. A solitary walk in search of turtle shells beside a lazy canal. This here and this now, this page, when memory is the other person in the room, the voice in my ear, the speculation.

words exclaimed in an empty room are pure self-conscience, the narcissist's folly.