Solitary Quotes - Page 6

• One solitary God-centered, God-intoxicated man can do more to keep God's love alive and His presence felt in the world than a thousand half-hearted, talkative busy men living frightened, fragmented lives of quiet desperation.

  Robert McNamara

  Faith, Inspiration, Men

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• Every one of the aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These... tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims - they are [called] the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight.

  Eugene V. Debs

  War, Fighting, Men

  Eugene V. Debs' speech he gave across the street from a jail, where he had just visited three socialists who were in prison for opposing the draft, June 1918.

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• Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.

  Patti Smith

  Song, Communication, Writing

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• Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being.

  Albert Einstein

  Men, Social, Social Being

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.32, Open Road Media

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• You don't believe that your friend could ever do anything great. You despise yourself in secret, even – no, especially – when you stand on your dignity; and since you despise yourself, you are unable to respect your friend. You can't bring yourself to believe that anyone you have sat at table with, or shared a house with, is capable of great achievement. That is why all great men have been solitary. It is hard to think in your company, little man. One can only think 'about' you, or 'for your benefit', not 'with' you, for you stifle all big, generous ideas.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Believe, Men, Thinking

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• The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Men, Thoughtful, Love Is

  Charles Baudelaire, “Crowds”

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• I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Lovely, Saws, Causes

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1869). “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus”, p.87

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• We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

  William Golding

  Race, Mad, Confusion

  WILLIAM GOLDING (1979). “DARKNESS VISIBLE”

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• She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.

  Kristin Cashore

  Beautiful, Stars, Loneliness

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• Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

  Virginia Woolf

  Views, Orlando, Feels

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.82, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Gideon was a man who’d lived an entirely solitary life, and yet he’d accepted me into it so completely that he could envision a future I was afraid to imagine. I was so scared I’d only be setting myself up for a heartbreak I couldn’t survive.

  Sylvia Day

  Men, Solitary Life, Gideon

  Sylvia Day (2013). “Entwined with You”, p.64, Penguin

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• The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.

  Salvador Dali

  Time, Space, Watches

  1969 Conquest of the Irrational.

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• That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires - smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge - are basically solitary pursuits.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Revenge, Being Alone, Two

  Fran Lebowitz (2011). “The Fran Lebowitz Reader”, p.77, Vintage

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• Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.

  Curzio Malaparte

  Men, Islands, Rocks

  Curzio Malaparte (2007). “Woman Like Me”, p.7, Troubador Publishing Ltd

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• That is what marks out the warrior: the knowledge that willpower and courage are not the same thing. Courage can attract fear and adulation, but willpower requires patience and commitment. Men and women with immense willpower are generally solitary types and give off a kind of coolness. Many people mistakenly think that (they) are cold (people) when nothing could be further from the truth.

  Paulo Coelho

  Commitment, Warrior, Thinking

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• A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.

  Josephine Tey

  Children, People, Tragedy

  Josephine Tey (2013). “The Daughter of Time”, p.52, Simon and Schuster

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• During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.

  Tahir Shah

  Suicide, Work Out, Mind

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• His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.

  Carson McCullers

  Years, Wreckage, Columns

  Carson McCullers (1998). “Collected Stories of Carson McCullers”, p.160, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

  Steven Erikson

  Grief, Break Through, Effort

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• Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Sadness, Thinking, Pieces

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2014). “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, p.339, Penguin UK

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• Mathematical Mark all mathematical heads, which be only and wholly bent to those sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with others, and how unapt to serve in the world.

  Roger Ascham

  Learning, Math, Science

  "The whole works of Roger Ascham".

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• Brothers and sisters, one of the great consolations of this Easter season is that because Jesus walked such a long, lonely path utterly alone, we do not have to do so. His solitary journey brought great company for our little version of that path…This Easter week and always, may we stand by Jesus Christ ‘at all times and in all things, and in all places that (we) may be in, even until death,’ for surely that is how He stood by us when it was unto death and when He had to stand entirely and utterly alone.

  Jeffrey R. Holland

  Lonely, Jesus, Easter

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• A cigar numbs sorrow and fills the solitary hours with a million gracious images.

  George Sand

  Sorrow, Cigar, Hours

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• No one can sum up all God is able to accomplish through one solitary life, wholly yielded, adjusted, and obedient to Him.

  Dwight L. Moody

  God, Solitary Life, Able

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• To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?

  Thomas Carlyle

  Life, Devil, Rolling

  Thomas Carlyle (2009). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition”, p.230, ReadHowYouWant.com

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