Quotes About Solitude

The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and suffice for our own happiness.

He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.

On the top of Cadair Idris, I felt how happy a man might be with a little money and a sane intellect, and reflected with astonishment and pity on the madness of the multitude.

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.

The fruit of solitude is originality, something daringly and disconcertingly beautiful, the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Thoughts come c.early while one walks.

Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men.

Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.

Wrapped in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveler took his ease, the hours slipping by unnoticed.

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions that others might shrug off with a glance, a laugh, or a brief conversation occupy him unduly, become profound in his silence, become significant, become experience, adventure, emotion.

Zo wist en wilde de verwarde niets anders meer dan de aanstichter van het vuur dat in hem brandde zonder ophouden te achtervolgen, over hem te dromen wanneer hij er niet was en naar de wijze van de verliefden louter tegen zijn schaduwbeeld tedere woorden te fluisteren. Eenzaamheid, de vreemde omgeving en het geluk van een late en diepe roes moedigden hem aan en haalden hem ertoe over om van zichzelf ook het meest bevreemdende zonder schaamte of blozen te accepteren, (...)

La soledad hace madurar lo original, lo audaz e inquietamente bello, el poema. Pero también engendra lo erróneo, desproporcionado, absurdo e ilícito.

Felicità per lo scrittore è il pensiero che può diventare interamente il sentimento, il sentimento che può diventare pensiero. Tali erano il pensiero palpitante e il sentimento rigoroso che appartenevano e obbedivano in quel momento al solitario: cioè, che la natura rabbrividisce di voluttà quando lo spirito s'inchina davanti alla bellezza.

It all comes to this: if you take care not to be a man of action, if you seek peace in solitude, you will find that life's vicissitudes fall upon you from within and it is upon that stage you must prove yourself a hero or a fool.

No meu íntimo dirijo perguntas ao mundo que me cerca, e, escutando, aguardo que se me indique um lugar que me permita enterrar-me longe de todos e, sem que ninguém perturbe, dialogar com minha vida e meu destino...

No, when it came to the ultimate and highest questions, there was no help from outside - no mediation, no absolution, no soothing consolation. Every man had to untangle the riddle on his own, had to work diligently at it, at hot speed, all by himself; before it was too late, he must either achieve some clear readiness for death, or die in despair.

Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, then society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.

Whose silence are you?

To be unknown to God is entirely too much privacy.

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night.

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God

Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.

A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary.