336 quotes
“Happiness is a skill that can be trained and solitude is one of its training grounds”
— Matthieu Ricard
“The quieter you become the more you can hear the universe speaking”
— Rumi
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore.”
— Lord Byron
“We look at the world once in childhood the rest is memory”
— Louise Gluck
“Walking along dripping wet no umbrella”
— Santoka Taneda
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone”
— Schopenhauer
“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
— Patricia Highsmith
“I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship”
— Louisa May Alcott
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry.”
— Thomas Mann
“In the depth of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer”
— Albert Camus
“Wandering is the activity of the child the passion of the genius it is the discovery of the self it is the artist walking”
— Rebecca Solnit
“In the mountain twilight I lean alone against the pine”
— Wang Wei
“One is not born free but becomes free through solitary reflection”
— Simone de Beauvoir
“When you cease to fear your solitude a new creativity awakens in you”
— John O Donohue
“The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles but only by a spiritual journey”
— Wendell Berry
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving when we can be alone we can be with others without using them as a means of escape”
— bell hooks
“The time will come when with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror”
— Derek Walcott
“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated”
— Ted Hughes
“Let me not look for allies in lifes battlefield but to my own strength alone”
— Rabindranath Tagore
“All that you touch you change all that you change changes you the only lasting truth is change”
— Octavia Butler
“Go out into the solitude and close the door behind thee. Let the manifold world that makes thee dizzy vanish from thy sight.”
— Mechthild of Magdeburg
“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind”
— Albert Einstein
“When you know who you are everything else falls into place”
— Jean Klein
“What is most personal is most universal”
— Carl Rogers
“The little things they are not little”
— Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The person who has not learned to be alone is a person who does not know themselves.”
— Lao Tzu
“Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity”
— David Whyte
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone and if he does not love solitude he will not love freedom”
— Seneca
“Works of art are of an infinite solitude and no means of approach is so useless as criticism”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Silence is essential for deep transformation to take place”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
“The quieter you become the more you can hear the whispers of your own soul”
— Ram Dass
“The root of joy is gratefulness it is not joy that makes us grateful it is gratitude that makes us joyful”
— David Steindl-Rast
“Dare to declare who you are it is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech”
— Hildegard of Bingen
“Silence is not about hearing nothing silence is about hearing everything at once”
— Cynthia Bourgeault
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life for true richness comes from within”
— Socrates
“I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide”
— Billy Collins
“No one is free who is not master of himself and mastery begins in solitude”
— Epictetus
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey”
“I dwell in possibility”
— Emily Dickinson
“You must understand the whole of life not just one little part of it that is why you must read that is why you must look at the skies that is why you must sing and dance”
— J. Krishnamurti
“Silence is essential we need silence just as much as we need air just as much as plants need light”
“All of humanitys problems stem from mans inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
— Blaise Pascal
“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems”
— Wislawa Szymborska
“Friendship needs no words it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness”
— Dag Hammarskjold
“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness”
— Meister Eckhart
“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.”
— Paul Tillich
“Silence is about getting inside what you are doing being in the world not just observing it from outside”
— Erling Kagge
“Knowing others is intelligence knowing yourself is true wisdom mastering others is strength mastering yourself is true power”
“People neglect the root and seek the branches”
— Huang Po
“It's okay to go alone. Just don't stop.”
— Anonymous
“When you lose touch with inner stillness you lose touch with yourself when you lose touch with yourself you lose yourself in the world”
— Eckhart Tolle
“The flower does not dream of the bee it blossoms and the bee comes”
— Mark Nepo
“The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.”
— Thomas Edison
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly but rarely admit the changes it has gone through in its cocoon”
— Maya Angelou
“The moment one gives close attention to anything even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious world”
— Henry Miller
“You wanna fly you got to give up the stuff that weighs you down”
— Toni Morrison
“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences”
— Cal Newport
“When you lose touch with inner stillness you lose touch with yourself”
“For oft when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude”
— William Wordsworth
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
“There are some things you learn best in calm and some in storm”
— Willa Cather
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
— Unknown
“In our natural state we are glorious beings in the world of illusion we are lost and imprisoned slaves to our appetites and our will to false power”
— Marianne Williamson
“True happiness arises from the enjoyment of one's self, and from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.”
— Joseph Addison
“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone”
“To walk in beauty means to walk with gratitude and appreciation for the natural world”
— Angeles Arrien
“In a day when you dont come across any problems you can be sure that you are travelling in a wrong path”
— Vivekananda
“Go back and pick up what you have left behind your creative life your ideas your dreams your hopes your original nature”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving and kindness toward yourself in solitude teaches you to be kind to others”
“A room without books is like a body without a soul and solitude without reflection is mere emptiness”
— Cicero
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”
— Aristotle
“Silence is not the absence of sound but the absence of self”
— Anthony de Mello
“Just to be is a blessing just to live is holy”
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Seclusion is the price of greatness.”
— Paramahansa Yogananda
“Stillness is your essential nature what is stillness it is the inner space in which the words on this page are being perceived”
“In the stillness of the night I have walked with you and we have spoken in the silence of our hearts”
— Khalil Gibran
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone”
— Alan Watts
“Ever since happiness heard your name it has been running through the streets trying to find you”
— Hafiz
“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“What I am pointing to is the possibility of complete and total peace right here right now regardless of any circumstances internal or external”
— Gangaji
“Happiness is not in objects nor in events nor in experiences it is in us”
— Francis Lucille
“Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things”
— Naomi Shihab Nye
“Knowing others is intelligence but knowing yourself is true wisdom”
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees but first I must learn what spring does alone”
— Pablo Neruda
“Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.”
— Louis Aragon
“It is not that we have a short time to live but that we waste much of it in noise”
“He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
“In the quiet hours of reflection we find the truest version of ourselves”
— Albert Schweitzer
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There are two ways of spreading light to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it”
— Edith Wharton
“We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars”
— Jack Gilbert
“I am no bird and no net ensnares me I am a free human being with an independent will”
— Charlotte Bronte
“In a field I am the absence of field this is always the case wherever I am I am what is missing”
— Mark Strand
“Silence is a place of freedom”
— Anne D. LeClaire
“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”
— Julian of Norwich
“Within each of us there is a silence a silence as vast as a universe we are afraid of it and we long for it”
— Gunilla Norris
“When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades and your image of the world fades and your ideas of others fade what is left a luminous empty awareness”
— Adyashanti
“Silence is the true teaching it is the perfect teaching it is suited only for the most advanced seeker”
— Ramana Maharshi
“The separate self is an intermittent experience awareness is the ever-present background”
— Rupert Spira
“I have dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after in the silence of my soul”
— Emily Bronte
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition.”
— Octavio Paz
“In the end just three things matter how well we have lived how well we have loved how well we have learned to let go”
— Jack Kornfield
“The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required”
— Anthony Storr
“Solitude is the place of purification.”
— Martin Luther
“From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road”
— Li-Young Lee
“I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a Christian a Hindu a Muslim a Buddhist a Jew”
“Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man.”
— Thomas De Quincey
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes including you”
— Anne Lamott
“Be alone that is the secret of invention be alone that is when ideas are born”
— Nikola Tesla
“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end”
— Sylvia Plath
“Nothing is harder to do than nothing”
— Jenny Odell
“Are you looking for me I am in the next seat my shoulder is against yours”
— Kabir
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am I am I am”
“Solitude is a way of waiting for the inexpressible and the unknowable to make itself felt”
— Sadhguru
“To write poetry one must bring full attention to the task”
— Jane Hirshfield
“Silence is a source of great strength”
“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude”
“Solitude is the audience-chamber of God.”
— Walter Savage Landor
“To be alone with your own thoughts is a luxury that most cannot afford”
— Michael Harris
“We do not come into this world we come out of it as leaves from a tree as the ocean waves the universe peoples”
“Go sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything”
— Desert Fathers
“In silence there is eloquence stop weaving and see how the pattern improves”
“Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights”
— Kahlil Gibran
“In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.”
— Laurence Sterne
“The sole cause of human unhappiness is that people do not know how to sit quietly in a room”
“We write to taste life twice in the moment and in retrospect”
— Anais Nin
“The quieter you become the more you can hear”
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
“The strongest of all warriors are these two: time and patience”
— Leo Tolstoy
“If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
“When we have nothing to cling to as our own we can even welcome the unknown”
— Henri Nouwen
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“How wild it was to let it be”
— Cheryl Strayed
“We live in capitalism its power seems inescapable so did the divine right of kings any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
“What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult for each other”
— George Eliot
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know in our solitude”
— Pema Chodron
“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light to know the dark go dark go without sight and find that the dark too blooms and sings”
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are”
— Soren Kierkegaard
“One of the lovely things about solitude is that it can happen in the middle of a crowd”
“Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company”
— Hannah Arendt
“I sometimes think I enjoy suffering but the truth is I would like the sky to be clear yet I also love clouds and rain”
— Fernando Pessoa
“The soul is healed by being with children and by being in solitude with ones own thoughts”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other”
“Stop seeking and you will find what you are looking for”
— Papaji
“Retire into yourself for the rational principle that rules has this nature: to be content with itself”
— Marcus Aurelius
“Solitude is the cure for the sickness caused by company”
— Petrarch
“And stand together yet not too near together for the pillars of the temple stand apart and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each others shadow”
“There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better stronger richer quicker or smarter everything is within everything exists nowhere else”
— Miyamoto Musashi
“Solitude is not a private therapeutic place but the place of conversion”
“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“If you want a place to rest Cold Mountain is good white clouds settle on the rocky peaks”
— Han Shan
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods there is a rapture on the lonely shore”
“Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.”
“The winds of grace blow all the time all we need to do is set our sails”
— Ramakrishna
“Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul”
“Solitude is the place of purification”
— Martin Buber
“Be melting snow wash yourself of yourself”
“Sitting quietly doing nothing spring comes and the grass grows by itself”
— Matsuo Basho
“The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.”
— Omar Khayyam
“Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.”
— James Russell Lowell
“Let the one who cannot be alone beware of community”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”
— Virginia Woolf
“In our lives we will inevitably face painful experiences but the suffering that accompanies them is optional”
— Tara Brach
“Silence is the language of God all else is poor translation”
“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you”
“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness found in solitary acceptance”
— Zhuangzi
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness and it took me years to understand that this too was a gift”
— Mary Oliver
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom.”
“Detached observer just watching the moon I belong to the autumn night”
— Saigyo
“The only journey is the one within”
“What is poetry which does not save nations or people”
— Czeslaw Milosz
“Solitude was my only consolation deep dark deathlike solitude”
— Mary Shelley
“On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree”
— W.S. Merwin
“In silence and stillness a devout soul makes progress and learns the hidden things of the scriptures”
— Thomas a Kempis
“I exist as I am and that is enough in the grand solitude of being”
— Walt Whitman
“An honorable human relationship is one in which two people have the right to use the word love”
— Adrienne Rich
“I celebrate myself and sing myself”
“A talent is formed in stillness a character in the world stream of life”
“Aloneness is a flower a lotus blooming in your heart”
— Osho
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves”
“In the dark night of the soul bright flows the river of God”
— John of the Cross
“The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen.”
— Francis Philip Frangipane
“Everything is a passing show learn to enjoy the show”
— Robert Adams
“The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer”
— Brother Lawrence
“Our lives are filled with noise and activity but the deepest truth is born in silence”
— Wayne Muller
“Settle yourself in solitude and you will come upon Him in yourself.”
— Teresa of Ávila
“Meditation is the ultimate mobile device you can use it anywhere anytime unobtrusively”
— Sharon Salzberg
“True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.”
— William Penn
— Thomas Keating
“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone and solitude to express the glory”
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes”
— Marcel Proust
“Appear at points which the enemy must hasten to defend march swiftly to places where you are not expected”
— Sun Tzu
“Solitude shows us the way back to our essential beauty which waits for us under our covering of opinions and attitudes”
— Roger Housden
“In order to understand the world one has to turn away from it on occasion”
“Inhabited space transcends geometrical space”
— Gaston Bachelard
“Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others but rather a practice of mindful presence”
— Parker Palmer
“The thief left it behind the moon at my window”
— Ryokan
“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us”
“Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
“If you wish to be a writer write”
“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.”
“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work”
— Gustave Flaubert
“You cannot be lonely if you like the person you are alone with”
— Wayne Dyer
“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love”
“True happiness arises from the enjoyment of one's self.”
“If you have the words there is always a chance that you will find the way”
— Seamus Heaney
“The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once and my conviction is to report that dialogue”
— Stanley Kunitz
“When hungry eat when tired sleep fools may laugh at me but wise men will know what I mean”
— Linji
“Silence is a true friend who never betrays”
— Confucius
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees”
“One can never have enough socks a good pair of thick winter socks can bring one closer to that simple peace of solitude”
“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”
— Edward Gibbon
“I have studied the science of departures”
— Osip Mandelstam
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition man is the only being who knows he is alone”
“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves is to remain ignorant by not having the courage to look at ourselves honestly”
“If you let go a little you will have a little peace if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace”
— Ajahn Chah
“In solitude we find that our life is not diminished but expanded”
— Thomas Merton
“We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all”
— Plotinus
“I have learned how faces fall how terror peers from lowered eyes”
— Anna Akhmatova
“In every walk with nature one receives far more than one seeks in solitary communion”
— John Muir
“Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love”
— Brene Brown
“Wisdom tells me I am nothing love tells me I am everything between the two my life flows”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
“A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself; it is a child of solitude.”
“Settle yourself in solitude and you will come upon Him in yourself”
— Teresa of Avila
“Be content with what you have rejoice in the way things are when you realize there is nothing lacking the whole world belongs to you”
“If you are lonely when you are alone you are in bad company”
“The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”
— Henrik Ibsen
“I love you without knowing how or when or from where I love you simply without problems or pride”
“A wandering mind is a sign that something is wrong with our prayer”
— Evagrius Ponticus
“In silence and in quiet the devout soul advances and learns the hidden meanings”
“You are the sky everything else is just the weather”
“Be alone and watch what happens when you are alone and totally accepting of your aloneness”
“All of humanitys problems stem from mans inability to sit quietly in a room alone”
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
— Aldous Huxley
“Solitude matters and for some people it is the air that they breathe”
— Susan Cain
“Solitude is where I place my chaos to rest and awaken my inner peace”
— Vicki Robin
“It is easy in the world to live after the worlds opinion it is easy in solitude to live after our own but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”
“Settle into solitude as if it were the one thing in the world you know how to do.”
“Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others rather it means never living apart from ones self”
“It is better to be alone than in bad company.”
— George Washington
“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures for in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed”
“In the middle of the forest there is an unexpected clearing which can only be found by those who have gotten lost”
— Tomas Transtromer
“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness”
— Chuang Tzu
“Whenever you are creating beauty around you you are restoring your own soul”
— Alice Walker
“One day I will find the right words and they will be simple”
— Jack Kerouac
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
“Where should the swordsman fix his mind nowhere let the body and limbs work themselves out according to a discipline they have undergone”
— Takuan Soho
“Once you fall into a reflective life you discover how little you need”
“The great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps the independence of solitude”
“I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”
— Emily Brontë
“There is no savor more sweet more salt than to be glad to be what woman and who myself I am”
— Denise Levertov
“Once you begin to recognize the divine image in yourself you begin to see it everywhere”
— Mooji
“You need not leave your room remain sitting at your table and listen do not even listen simply wait be quiet still and solitary the world will freely offer itself to you”
— Franz Kafka
“What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.”
— Ellen Burstyn
“I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out and I say oh I am miserable what shall I do and the sea says in its lovely voice excuse me I have work to do”
“When the mind is free from all conditions it is called basic mind”
— Joshu
“When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too”
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships”
— Charles Simic
“We have two lives and the second begins when we realize we only have one best discovered alone”
“We do not grow absolutely chronologically we grow sometimes in one dimension and not in another”
— Anaïs Nin
“People look for retreats for themselves in the country, by the coast, or in the hills. But nowhere can a person retreat more peacefully than into their own soul.”
“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self to study the self is to forget the self”
— Dogen
“Solitude is the companion of greatness and the nurse of genius”
“The person who has not learned to be happy and content while completely alone for an hour a day, or a week, has missed life's greatest serenity.”
— Lin Yutang
“Things wont just lean together and create what we need to live”
— Kay Ryan
“Be still and heal let the forest take away your worries”
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
“You do not need to leave your room to discover the world”
“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living we live ourselves into new ways of thinking”
— Richard Rohr
“In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things”
“He who sits alone, sleeps alone, and walks alone, who is strenuous and subdues himself alone, will find delight in the solitude of the forest.”
— Gautama Buddha
“The best portion of a good life is the little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love done in quiet”
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart who looks outside dreams who looks inside awakes”
— Carl Jung
“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts but when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips and sound is a diversion but faith returns you to your heart”
“The bud stands for all things even for those things that dont flower”
— Galway Kinnell
“Aloneness is not loneliness loneliness is a negative state aloneness is positive aloneness is full”
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself”
— Montaigne
“I am awfully greedy I want everything from life I want to be a woman and to be a man to have many friends and to have loneliness”
“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort”
— Jane Austen
“In the darkness two shadows reaching through the hopeless heavy dusk their hands met and light spilled in a flood like a survey of the sun”
— Madeline Miller
“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise but seek what they sought in solitary contemplation”
“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
— Charlotte Brontë
“You do not have to be good you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting”
“Not thinking about anything is Zen once you know this walking sitting or lying down everything you do is Zen”
— Bodhidharma
“Your unborn mind is not something you learned how to have you were born with it”
— Bankei
“I who leave the world and turn away from it even to me the moon is a friend”
“The supreme calling of every human being is to aspire to self-realization”
— Anandamayi Ma
“I am quite comfortable alone with my thoughts and my purpose”
— Abraham Lincoln
“The darkness around us is deep”
— Robert Bly
“Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future but something you must discover now through faith”
“That is what learning is you suddenly understand something that you have understood all your life but in a new way”
— Doris Lessing
“The peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief”
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”
— Simone Weil
“All life is yoga”
— Sri Aurobindo
“Without great solitude no serious work is possible.”
— Pablo Picasso
“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community let him who is not in community beware of being alone”
“When you do something you should burn yourself completely like a good bonfire leaving no trace of yourself”
— Shunryu Suzuki
“Wilderness is the place where we learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable alone”
“Silence is a place of great power and healing”
— Sara Maitland
“Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others rather it means never living apart from oneself”
“Settle into solitude like a tree in the midst of a vast plain — rooted, silent, and alive.”
“I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude”
“A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live”
— Bertrand Russell
“The best remedy for those who are afraid lonely or unhappy is to go outside somewhere where they can be quiet alone with the heavens nature and God.”
— Anne Frank
“The purpose of all our effort is to achieve purity of heart”
— Cassian
“Dont ask yourself what the world needs ask what makes you come alive and then go and do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive”
— Howard Thurman
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition”
“Do not be afraid of silence do not be afraid of aloneness just sit and the jewels of peace and happiness will come to you”
— Ajahn Brahm
“The art of losing isnt hard to master”
— Elizabeth Bishop
“Settle into solitude as if it were an old friend.”
“Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time”
— Hermann Hesse
“The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard but doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole a plow”
— Yehuda Amichai
“The small man builds cages for everyone he knows while the sage who has to duck his head when the moon is low keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners”
“Loneliness is the poverty of self solitude is the richness of self”
— May Sarton
“Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself”
“Every day priests minutely examine the law and endlessly chant complicated sutras before doing that though they should learn how to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain the snow and moon”
— Ikkyu
“The function of prayer is not to influence God but rather to change the nature of the one who prays”
“Try to praise the mutilated world”
— Adam Zagajewski
“Attention is the beginning of devotion”
“In an age of speed I began to think nothing could be more invigorating than going slow in an age of distraction nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention”
— Pico Iyer
“It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew and in that there is joy”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“I have become my own version of an optimist if I cant make it through one door I will go through another or I will make a door”
“The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space free from the outside pressures.”
— Marya Mannes
“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.”
“Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”
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