Solitude Quotes - Page 34

• We need to build downtime into our lives, so that we can have solitude without feeling overcome with guilt.

  Melody Beattie

  Feelings, Guilt, Overcoming

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• After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

  Albert Camus

  Art, Pain, Lying

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• Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

  Albert Camus

  Self, Giving, Quality

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• He was raised by three nurses: freedom, solitude and Mademoiselle. Together, the three of them provided him with an education. From them, he learned everything he believed it was possible to learn.

  Timothee de Fombelle

  Nurse, Together, Three

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• The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Sex, Men, Unions

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• A WISE MAN never enjoys himself so much, or a FOOL so little, as when he is alone.

  Josh Billings

  Wise, Men, Littles

  "Wit and Wisdom of Josh Billings [pseud.]: Choice Bits of Fun and Philosophy of the Great Humorist Carefully Collected and Revised".

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• The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won.

  Joseph Campbell

  Illumination, Noble, Departure

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.142, New World Library

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• In the tumult of great events, solitude was what I hoped for. Now it is what I love. How is it possible to be contented with anything else when one has come face to face with history?

  Charles de Gaulle

  Events, Faces, Tumult

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• Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2004). “A Dream Too Wild: Emerson Meditations for Every Day of the Year”, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

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• As for solitude, I cannot understand how certain people seek to lay claim to intellectual stature, nobility of soul and strength of character, yet have not the slightest feeling for seclusion; for solitude, I maintain, when joined with a quiet contemplation of nature, a serene and conscious faith in creation and the Creator, and a few vexations from outside is the only school for a mind of lofty endowment.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Character, School, People

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1963). “Goethe's world view: presented in his reflections and maxims”

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• Deep down, Erikson wants profoundly to be respected and admired - and very deep down he wants to be left alone.

  Stanley Hoffmann

  Want, Erikson, Very Deep

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• Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves

  Samuel Johnson

  Too Much, Study, States

  Samuel Johnson (1761). “The Rambler: In Four Volumes”, p.185

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• In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert.

  Samuel Johnson

  Dream, Art, Philosophy

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey Into North Wales”, p.167

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• There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.

  May Sarton

  Winter, Alive, Wilder

  May Sarton (2014). “As Does New Hampshire: And Other Poems”, p.10, Open Road Media

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• Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Company

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa (1982). Translated by Richard Zenith, p. 73, 2006.

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• Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious.

  Victor Hugo

  Men, Dull, He Man

  Victor Hugo (2016). “Toilers of the Sea”, p.45, Victor Hugo

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• If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Slave, Born, Ifs

  Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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• May you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Confidence, People, May

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

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• There is no insurmountable solitude.

  Pablo Neruda

  Insurmountable

  "Towards the Splendid City". Pablo Neruda's Nobel lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 13, 1971.

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• Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Work, Creative

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• One must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.

  Meister Eckhart

  Strong, Mind, May

  Meister Eckhart, Raymond Bernard Blakney (1941). “Celebrated 14th Century Mystic and Scholastic Meister Eckhart”

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• What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?

  Edward Abbey

  Freedom, Rights, Discovery

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• And for this you must have quiet and solitude. But society does not allow you to have them. You must be with people, outwardly active at all costs. If you are alone you are considered antisocial or peculiar, or you are afraid of your own loneliness.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Loneliness, People, Doe

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1991). “The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti: 1936-1944, The mirror of relationship”, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company

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• There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Space, Silence, Individual

  Herbert Marcuse (2004). “The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse”, p.117, Routledge

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• There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.

  Thomas Merton

  Soul, Intimacy, Know How

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.175, Shambhala Publications

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