Solitary Quotes - Page 19

• The fruit of solitude is increased sensitivity and compassion for others. There comes a new freedom to be with people. There is new attentiveness to their needs, new responsiveness to their hurts. Thomas Merton observes, 'It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them.... Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.

  Richard J. Foster

  Hurt, Brother, Compassion

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• There is a lesson that I learned at twelve - the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson - that neither does the world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary spear carrier among them.

  Alexei Panshin

  Years, Two, People

  Alexei Panshin (1982). “Rite of passage”, Pocket

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• Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, it's fed. That is why beholding someone else's creative word, images, idea, fills us up, and inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Creativity, Break Through, Ideas

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• Watching the moon at midnight, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely, no part left out.

  Izumi Shikibu

  Moon, Sky, Midnight

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• It’s important that someone celebrate our existence," she objected amiably. "People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Motivational, Mirrors, Punishment

  Lois McMaster Bujold (1994). “Mirror Dance”, p.129, Baen Books

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• At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Loneliness, Twilight, Night

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.40, e-artnow

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• By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Self, Needs

  Bertrand Russell (2008). “History of Western Philosophy”, p.681, Simon and Schuster

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• They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms: Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide; They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.

  John Milton

  Hands, Eden, Tears

  Paradise Regained bk. 4, l. 220 (1671) SeeWilliamWordsworth 12

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• My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him.

  Immanuel Velikovsky

  Father, Names, Firsts

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• His brow is seamed with line and scar; His cheek is red and dark as wine; The fires as of a Northern star Beneath his cap of sable shine. His right hand, bared of leathern glove, Hangs open like an iron gin, You stoop to see his pulses move, To hear the blood sweep out and in. He looks some king, so solitary In earnest thought he seems to stand, As if across a lonely sea He gazed impatient of the land. Out of the noisy centuries The foolish and the fearful fade; Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes, Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.

  Walter de La Mare

  Lonely, Kings, Stars

  Walter De la Mare (1920). “Collected Poems, 1901-1918”

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• Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Loneliness, Writing, Hazards

  "A Widow’s Story" by Joyce Carol Oates, www.newyorker.com. December 13, 2010.

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• If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creature s let him begin the long, solitary task of perfecting himself.

  Robertson Davies

  Men, Long, Tasks

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• The artist's task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society.

  Eric Maisel

  Wise, Successful, Artist

  Eric Maisel (1996). “Affirmations for Artists”, Tarcher

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• How could someone possibly be that beautiful? She wondered for the hundred thousandth time. What higher power orchestrated such a perfect union of genes? Who decided that one single solitary soul deserved skin like that? It was so fundamentally unfair.(Chasing Harry Winston)

  Lauren Weisberger

  Beautiful, Perfect, Soul

  Lauren Weisberger (2009). “Chasing Harry Winston: A Novel”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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• The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, Men, Mountain

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “The Maine Woods”, p.5, Cosimo, Inc.

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• A spiritual retreat is medicine for soul starvation. Through silence, solitary practice, and simple living, we begin to fill the empty reservoir. This lifts the veils, dissolves the masks, and creates space within for the feelings of forgiveness, compassion, and loving kindness that are so often blocked.

  David A. Cooper

  Spiritual, Kindness, Simple

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• In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Order, Ideas, Rivers

  "In the Air" by Malcolm Gladwell, www.newyorker.com. May 12, 2008.

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• Solitude without togetherness deteriorates into loneliness. One needs strong roots in togetherness to be solitary rather than lonely when one is alone.

  David Steindl-Rast

  Lonely, Strong, Loneliness

  David Steindl-Rast (1983). “A listening heart: the art of contemplative living”, Crossroad Pub Co

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• An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Mean, Writing, Reality

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• Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.

  Neil Gaiman

  Solitude, Together, May

  Interview with Linda L. Richards, januarymagazine.com. August 2001.

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• Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

  George Eliot

  Cheating, Children, Play

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.90, Wordsworth Editions

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• In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Bridges, Broken, Expectations

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2008). “The Narrative Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.136, Wildside Press LLC

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• A solitary traveler can sleep from state to state, from day to night, from day to day, in the long womb of its controlled interior. It is the cradle that never stops rocking after the lullaby is over. It is the biggest sleeping tablet in the world, and no one need ever swallow the pill, for it swallows them.

  Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

  Travel, Sleep, Night

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• Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn't even know had a particular smell. I wonder what will someday bring back Dex and our few months together. Maybe the sound of Dido's voice. Maybe the scent of the Aveda shampoo I've been using all summer.

  Emily Giffin

  Summer, Song, Voice

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• In the last stage of the spiritual master's life, the devotees of the spiritual master should take preaching activities into their own hands. In this way the spiritual master can sit down in a solitary place and render nirjana-bhajana.

  A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

  Spiritual, Hands, Way

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