Quotes About Solitude

Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death. But by that very fact the solitary finds himself on the level of a more perfect spiritual society—the city of those who have become real enough to confess and glorify God (that is, life) in the teeth of death.

Thomas Merton

Let there be a place somewhere in which you can breathe naturally, quietly, and not have to take your breath in continuous short gasps. A place where your mind can be idle, and forget its concerns, descend into silence, and worship the Father in secret.

But nevertheless, no man who seeks liberation and light in solitude, no man who seeks spiritual freedom, can afford to yield passively to all the appeals of a society of salesmen, advertisers and consumers.

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, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility

And everything seemed to conspire to encourage me to cut myself off from everybody else and go my own way.

I should be able to return to solitude each time as to the place I have never described to anybody, as the place which I have never brought anyone to see, as the place whose silence has mothered an interior life known to no one but God alone.

Thomas Merton

There is a monastic outlook which is common to all those who have elected to question the value of a life submitted entirely to arbitrary secular presuppositions, dictated by social convention, and dedicated to the pursuit of temporal satisfactions which are perhaps only a mirage. Whatever may be the value of life in the world there have been, in all cultures, men who have claimed to find something they vastly prefer in solitude. (p. 10)

True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist.

Thomas Merton

Go into the desert not to escape other men but in order to find them in God.

Possibly, what is required of some of us, and chiefly of me, is a solitary and personal response in the form of nonacquiescence, but quiet, definite and pure.

I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garland's dead, And all but he departed!

The most radical conclusion to draw from this would be that your mind is the only thing that exists.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.

You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.

He gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.

Now single up all lines!

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. This may have nothing to do with the acts we have committed, or the humors we do go in and out of. It may be only the room--a cube--having no persuasive powers of its own. The room simply is. To occupy it, and find a metaphor there for memory, is our own fault.

Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.

Two of them there drinking red liquor like it was sadness medicine.

Più vicino a te, o mio divano.