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