Solitary Quotes - Page 20

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• When you've written a movie, you then get together with a whole lot of people and make it. In many ways, I think it is far nicer to be with people rather than being completely solitary.

  Neil Jordan

  Thinking, People, Together

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• I never actually sexually attacked anybody. But I'm a writer, too, and I was always trying to figure out a way to recreate the experience of being this Albert Camus, Stranger-like solitary protagonist character without incriminating myself in any way, like, "Oh, what a perv!" I want to reach out to anybody out there who may have been riding on the train one time when things in their life were completely falling apart and saw a girl's legs in a skirt and it's the last bit of goodness that you can see.

  Willis Earl Beal

  Fall, Character, Trying

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms.

  Lewis Thomas

  Independent, Imagination, Would Be

  "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher" by Lewis Thomas, (p. 13), 1979.

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• Inspiration is solitary, never consecutive.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Inspiration, Consecutive

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• Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Lying, Men, Talking

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge college is as solitary as a dervis in the desert.

  Henry David Thoreau

  College, Men, Space

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.83, Simon and Schuster

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• The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.

  Anais Nin

  Cells, Soul, Photographer

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• Only in the sacredness of inward silence does the soul truly meet the secret, hiding God. The strength of resolve, which afterward shapes life, and mixes itself with action, is the fruit of those sacred, solitary moments. There is a divine depth in silence. We meet God alone.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Silence, Soul, Secret

  Frederick William Robertson (1857). “Sermons Preached at Trinity Chapel, Brighton: Second Series”, p.54

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• External objects produce decided effects upon the brain. A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise for the thinking faculty!

  Jules Verne

  Wall, Exercise, Men

  Jules Verne, Jules VERNE (2016). “Journey to the Interior of the Earth”, p.150, Jules Verne

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• Always go to the solitary drinker for the truth!

  Anita Loos

  Drinkers

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• Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.

  Martha Manning

  Cancer, Erosion, Doors

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• In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Children, Years, Way

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2014). “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, p.300, Penguin UK

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• I do like Twitter. Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can get lonely. I like to go into Twitter for a short period of time, communicate with clever friends, and then switch it off. That's perfect for me.

  Lauren Groff

  Lonely, Clever, Writing

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• They had stopped now and he gave a glance up at the sky, through the trees, as though to see how much time was left. Amber, watching him, was suddenly struck with panic. Now he was going--out again into that great world with its bustle and noise and excitement--and she must stay here. She had a terrible new feeling of loneliness, as if she stood in some solitary corner at a party where she was the only stranger. Those places he had seen, she would never see; those fine things he had done, she would never do. But worst of all she would never see him again.

  Kathleen Winsor

  Loneliness, Party, Sky

  Kathleen Winsor (2000). “Forever Amber”, p.44, Chicago Review Press

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• I've never had inner turmoil about all this. You find a lot of people these days who cannot stand to be alone. You could lock me up in solitary for weeks on end, and I'd keep myself amused.

  Keith Richards

  People, Locks, Week

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• The stars are forth, the moon above the tops Of the snow-shining mountains--beautiful! I linger yet with nature, for the night Hath been to me a more familiar face Than that of man, and in her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness I learned the language of another world.

  Lord Byron

  Beautiful, Stars, Moon

  'Manfred' (1817) act 3, sc. 4, l. 2

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• Because of the friends I have known, the honorable people I have met, I know I am no solitary hero of unique causes. I know now that when I die, I will live on. That which is important will live on. This is my Legacy; and by the grace of the gods, I am not alone.

  R. A. Salvatore

  Hero, Unique, People

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• That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Regret, Night, Bed

  Siri Hustvedt (2017). “The Blindfold”, p.34, Simon and Schuster

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• There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

  Nicole Krauss

  People, Silence, Way

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• The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Book, Character

  Henry David Thoreau (1939). “Walden: or, Life in the woods”

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• Creativity is a space for solitary longing, the desire to be elsewhere in space and time, to be in a new ideal world where life is as it should be.

  Chenjerai Hove

  Creativity, Space, Desire

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