Solitary Quotes - Page 14

• The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Solitude, Miserable

  Samuel Johnson, Abraham Raimbach, Robert Smirke (1819). “Rasselas”, p.85

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• Our grandsire, Adam, ere of Eve possesst,
  Alone, and e'en in Paradise unblest,
  With mournful looks the blissful scenes survey'd,
  And wander'd in the solitary shade.
  The Maker say, took pity, and bestow'd
  Woman, the last, the best reserv'd of God.

  Alexander Pope

  Women, Shade, Lasts

  Alexander Pope, Alexander Dyce (1851). “The poetical works of Alexander Pope”, p.255

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• Only a God of love is fully personal. Thus the Trinity is crucial for maintaining a fully personal concept of God. As theologian Robert Letham writes, “Only a God who is triune can be personal.... A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person.” Therefore it “has no way to explain or even to maintain human personhood.

  Nancy Pearcey

  Writing, Love Is, Way

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• I'm consumed by the chill of solitary.

  Alanis Morissette

  Sadness, Chill, Consumed

  Song: All I Really Want, Album: Jagged Little Pill, 1995

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• Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Vision, Dominion

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.337, Routledge

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• Life is not a solitary activity. Live well by living for others.

  Ron Kaufman

  Service Culture, Life Is, Live Well

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• What a position of transcendent horror must that be, where the perpetrator of a great crime, till then a stranger to positive guilt, finds himself suddenly cut off, and forever, from all human sympathy, isolated from hope, the tenant of a solitary cell, and with a wide, impassable gulf yawning between him and that great brotherhood of which he has ceased to be a part--no longer regarded as a man, but as a monster in the shape of one, from whom Mercy herself turns away, and for whom Pity even has no tears!

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Cutting, Men, Yawning

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• You are always training yourself to be, mind and body, as clear as crystal, and you always are, and never change; whereas I am a muddy, solitary, moping weed.

  Charles Dickens

  Weed, Character, Interesting

  Charles Dickens (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)”, p.8363, Delphi Classics

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• We must...forge partnerships with those around us, and begin to dismantle the myth of solitary perfection.

  Debora Spar

  Perfection, Partnership, Myth

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• If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, 'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?

  Charles Dickens

  Inspirational, Gratitude, Heart

  Charles Dickens (1904). “A tale of two cities, with intr., notes, and analytical list of characters”

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• I'm the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it's the best of both possible worlds.

  Ariel Dorfman

  Writing, Thinking, Community

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• It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing.

  Neil Jordan

  Book, Writing, Way

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• There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains itsmaxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Bible, Rumor

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.188, Xist Publishing

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• Some moralist or mythological poet
  Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
  I am satisfied with that,
  Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
  Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, Swans, Mirrors

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.177, Wordsworth Editions

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• I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

  Nicole Krauss

  Fall, Character, Spectrum

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• [He] would drive his sculling boat through mile after mile, in a silent brutal programe of conditioning - he would work all alone, at first light, punishing himself without mercy. His was the private dignity of the lone athlete, with a grim purpose, fighting a solitary war with himself, toward a goal only he can see.

  Daniel Topolski

  War, Athlete, Fighting

  Daniel Topolski, Patrick Robinson (2013). “True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny”, p.32, Random House

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• He [Zampano] probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angels of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.

  Mark Z. Danielewski

  Believe, Angel, Sacrifice

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• The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

  Virginia Woolf

  Twilight, Moving, Knitting

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.56, Broadview Press

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• “Et Tu, Babe” was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer’s life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing, it’s my whole life.

  Mark Leyner

  Reading, Writing, Certainty In Life

  "Mark Leyner On “War, Inc.”". Interview with Aaron Hillis, www.ifc.com. May 22, 2008.

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• The man who follows Christ in solitary mourning is greater than he who praises Christ amid the congregation of men.

  Isaac of Nineveh

  Christian, Men, Mourning

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• Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually cultivates it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.

  M. Scott Peck

  Spiritual, Loss, Journey

  M. Scott Peck (2003). “The Road Less Traveled, Timeless Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth”, Touchstone

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• It's all still there in heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come.

  Edward Abbey

  Pain, Heart, Journey

  Edward Abbey (1984). “Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside”, p.49, Macmillan

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• The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer's morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.

  Charles Dickens

  Summer, Morning, Air

  Charles Dickens (1839). “Sketches by Boz: Pseud. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People”, p.55

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• The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Men, Race, Feelings

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• I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

  John Fowles

  Girl, Sex, Loneliness

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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