Solitude Quotes - Page 31

• What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Children, Able, Hours

  "Letters to a Young Poet". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 6, 1929.

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• I like people. I like watching them. It's just that I'd prefer to do it from a mile away using very powerful binoculars.

  Geraldine McCaughrean

  Powerful, People, Miles

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• I am not a joiner. Somewhere I once said that people join clubs now for the very reason they once carried them, a need for security. Maybe I'm alone more often than I should be, because I try to find security within myself.

  Rod McKuen

  People, Trying, Needs

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• [Kierkegaard] did not care for large public events because every crowd is in itself an untruth. The only way out is isolation, aloofness. Only the individual is a reality and only the individual is true. Maybe the process of isolation in an individual is one of the most important matters that exists. Is not the whole point of this world for people to separate and become individuals?

  Mati Unt

  Reality, People, Important

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• Every so often a disappearance is in order. A vanishing. A checking out. An indeterminate period of unavailability. Each person, each sane person, maintains a refuge, or series of refuges, for this purpose. A place, or places, where they can, figuratively if not literally, suspend their membership in the human race.

  John Murray

  Race, Order, Purpose

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• I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure.

  Fleur Adcock

  Writing, Feelings, Nerves

  Fleur Adcock (2000). “Poems 1960-2000”, Bloodaxe Books Limited

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• I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone else. Some people would be better off alone, but they feel they've got to get hold of someone to prove they're worthwhile.

  Liv Ullmann

  Lonely, Thinking, People

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• I prize the privilege of being alone.

  Carl Rogers

  Privilege, Prize

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date we dream of going home to watch television. We would prefer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit. We are almost constitutionally incapable of casual relationships.

  Sasha Cagen

  Dream, Home, Mean

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• One of the many advantages of being a loner is that often there's time to think, ponder, brood, meditate deeply, and figure things out to one's satisfaction.

  Andrea Seigel

  Wisdom, Thinking, Feeling Lonely

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• Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
  Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
  The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
  The costly aversion of the eyes from death-
  Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

  Philip Larkin

  Running, Eye, Desire

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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• If a woman is to know herself, then periods of solitude should be courted, planned, and embraced.

  Mary Blakely

  Should, Periods, Knows

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• Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, enthusiasm is the true part of genius.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Nurse, Genius, Enthusiasm

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• Solitude can become your most meaningful companion and it can assist you in being a more giving person in your spiritual partnerships. Rather than regarding your partner's need for time alone as a threat, see it as a time of renewal that you celebrate. Make every effort to help each other have that space. Treat that space as sacred.

  Wayne Dyer

  Meaningful, Spiritual, Space

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• Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself.

  Sigmund Freud

  People, Suffering, Tasks

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• Society is no comfort, to one not sociable.

  William Shakespeare

  Comfort, Sociable

  1610 Innogen. Cymbeline, act 4, sc.2, l.12-13.

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• The thought, the deadly thought of solitude.

  John Keats

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• And being alone is the best way to be
  When I'm by myself it's the best way to be
  When I'm all alone it's the best way to be
  When I'm by myself nobody else can say goodbye

  Edie Brickell

  Goodbye, Way, All Alone

  Song: Circle Of Friends

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• We come into the world alone. We go away the same. We're meant to spend the interlude between in closeness or so we tell ourselves. But it's a long way from the morning to the evening.

  Rod McKuen

  Morning, Long, Going Away

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• I chose the shadows; they did not choose me. I stay here securely not just because I feel plain, but because disappearance is by now the easy way. The habit. The worn path that I can trod knowingly and be assured safe passage home.

  Rod McKuen

  Home, Shadow, Safe

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• We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

  Honore de Balzac

  Moral, Resources

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• Deliberately seeking solitude-quality time spent away from family and friends-may seem selfish. It is not. Solitude is as necessary for our creative spirits to develop and flourish as are sleep and food for our bodies to survive.

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Selfish, Sleep, Creative

  Sarah Ban Breathnach (2008). “Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort of Joy”, p.234, Hachette UK

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• It is a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Art, Practice, Quality

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2010). “Gift from the Sea”, p.34, Random House

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• Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.

  Jonathan Swift

  Wise, People, Wise People

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• In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.

  Albert Camus

  Distance, Order, Cities

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.157, Vintage

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