c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true.
— Sherry Turkle
Who are we without our addictions; without our media-induced hungers? So often the voices we hear echoing in our mind are not our own but that of our influencers. Isolation, while arguably going against human nature, is essential for mental and emotional health. Solitude is a detoxification of all that distorts our personality and misguides our path in life. It allows us to filter out the foreign opinions and hear our own voice—reach our authentic character—and practice fidelity to self.
— L.M. Browning, Seasons of Contemplation: A Book of Midnight Meditations
But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-''Like lights in a storm-''In the midst of a hurricane,' she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind.
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
We take our fetters with us
—  our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind
A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing.
— Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude
True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know.
— Anton Chekhov
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to live to yourself.
— Michel de Montaigne
Souls are like stars. There are thousands upon thousands around us yet we only see a few hundred. We know the names of only a handful of them even though we see them every day. They are just there, they are constant. Some change over the years but some stay exactly the same. We can see that some are in pairs and their whole world revolves around each other. Yet there are stars that exist in solitude. They are alone in the big black vastness of space and they have no hope of reaching others in their lifetime. They burn bright; maybe brighter than most but they are alone. They might have a few things around them but those are insignificant and invisible to the outsider. Sometimes when two stars get closer to each other, they affect the other's course, they become brighter for each other but as time passes they get further and further from one another until they blend into the rest, they become strangers again. But the affect remains and their future will never be the same from then on.
— Daniel Gyorki
Sometimes I look out the window out into the big, bright world and stare at people. Passers-by who live their ordinary lives and experience a full range of extraoridnary emotions. I stare at them for minutes, sometimes hours and then it makes me think, it makes me wonder. Are there people who are born healthy, who are born perfectly normal yet there is something wrong with them? Something nobody feels, nobody understands or questions, something that no one has ever even heard of? What if there are people among us who are capable of truly falling for someone, who are - in all biological, emotional, hormonal, chemical, philosophical senses - capable of loving someone with romantic love but no one in this wide world is capable of requiting that? Is it possible? Is it the fault of that person? Is it perhaps in the genes, the very DNA of someone? Is it perhaps destiny? And those passers-by go along happily without knowing anyone has ever asked something like this and they will probably never think about anything such because there might be only one person in this world who has to experience the feeling, the feeling that is so deeply rooted in a life alone.
— Daniel Gyorki
I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.
— Anna Quindlen
One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft shushing of the ship’s systems, like a mechanical sea.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Company is a burden to those at home in the solitude of their souls.
— Erika Robuck, The House of Hawthorne
Intimacy between people requires closeness as well as distance. It is like dancing. Sometimes we are very close, touching each other or holding each other; sometimes we move away from each other and let the space between us become an area where we can freely move.To keep the right balance between closeness and distance requires hard work, especially since the needs of the partners may be quite different at a given moment. One might desire closeness while the other wants distance. One might want to be held while the other looks for independence. A perfect balance seldom occurs, but the honest and open search for that balance can give birth to a beautiful dance, worthy to behold.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
Reading is solitude.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
The threat of rain appears to have nothing to do with Joao Elvas's desire to be alone, and one must not forget that, strange as it may seem, some men can spend their entire life alone and enjoy solitude, especially if it is raining and their crust is hard.
— José Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda
Isolation is a way to know ourselves.
— Franz Kafka
I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations".
— May Sarton
In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be;Where all the noises, that on peace intrude,Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee,Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.
— John Clare, The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems
There is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd.
— Claire North
What's so magical about solitude? In many fields, it's only when you're alone that you can engage in deliberate practice. This is the key to exceptional achievement.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.
— Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
People who need people are threatened by people who don’t. The idea of seeking contentment alone is heretical, for society steadfastly decrees that our completeness lies in others.
— Lionel Fisher, Celebrating Time Alone: Stories Of Splendid Solitude
Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
O take me from the busy crowd,I cannot bear the noise!For Nature's voice is never loud;I seek for quiet joys.The book I love is everywhere,And not in idle words;The book I love is known to all,And better lore affords.
— John Clare, The Later Poems, 1837-1864: Volumes I and II
Love makes me naked
— Propinquity's a harsh master
The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery
The wise oyster stays in its shell.
— Marty Rubin
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Mr. Collins was to attend them, at the request of Mr. Bennet, who was most anxious to get rid of him, and have his library to himself
— Jane Austen
There is a charm in Solitude that cheersA feeling that the world knows nothing ofA green delight the wounded mind endearsAfter the hustling world is broken off
— John Clare, John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose
Only a few have learned to savor the significance of solitude. Those who can glory in being alone on occasion are the saint or poet or explorer.
— William P. Barker
Looking at the rain through my window,I can’t find an answer to this merciless solitude—The same solitude that sprouts from my eyes,A bittersweet tear which haunts me like a shadow.During evenings like this my life is about sad memories.At times I believe you’re so evil, but at end of the day you make the effort to change what my mind tells.Why don’t you turn away and let me find the love that I need?I hope you will never abandon my life and when that beautiful day comesI am going to thank you for being my lovely company.You! Eternal loneliness that poisons me-Don’t feel miserable due to these words,I only use you to drown my sorrows, to not die alone in omission.
— Julieth Figueroa R.
my dearest agony let us be together, i am not seasoned for this solitude.
— Nation C White
In a soulmate we find not company, but a completed solitude.
— Robert Brault
It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.
— Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.
— Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove, Part 1
For her a day of pampering meant comic books, black liquorice, serious exercise, veggie curry and, above all, solitude.
— Salla Simukka, As Red as Blood
Tried a lot,but can't find a companion like you my dear solitude. Let us shake our hands again.
— sandeep bhat
Still, how I nearly felt. In the midst of all that looking.
— David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills. For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him... the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
The things I know, every man can know, but, oh, my heart is mine alone!
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings
We all are individual and lonely, like stars which appear so close but millions of miles apart.
— Santosh Kalwar, That's My Love Story
She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of grooming. The tongue and fingers are governed by the same parts of the brain. He marvels at how close they can be some nights on the phone and how words really are the equal of touch. Bakelite pressed hard against his ear.She says it's not just the freedom from him and from their daughter. I feel some sort of opening. I saw things so clearly today.He thinks about the solitary figure in every religion, the monks, saints and shamans in every tradition who walk out into wilderness on their own and find revelation.It's what solitude does to a social animal he says.People talk of recognizing something greater than themselves when they're alone because we finally have to realize how helpless we are as individuals. There's a freedom, a sense of wonder in feeling for a moment that we don't have to please anyone or adjust to the needs of others. And there's a fear in realizing how small we are, how much those distant others normally insulate us from seeing the limits of our mostly incompetent bodies. When we're on our own we seek solutions and speculate and fictionalize because that's what we do when we're confronted with survival. That's revelation.Maybe she says, I'm just saying I'd like to eat less meat. We could have fish.
— Colin McAdam, A Beautiful Truth
To love can mean 'to love oneself,' and often love is no more than a juxtaposition of two solitudes.
— Pope Paul VI
For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet—to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he spoke of himself as the voice of one "crying in the wilderness." Because the mission of the intellectual is to be the man who, from his desert, his basic solitude—and man is only man amid his truth, only himself when he is alone—cries aloud to others and invites them to each into his own solitude.
— José Ortega y Gasset, An Interpretation of Universal History
I choose solitude over cold kisses. If it isn't love, it is poison.
— Anita Krizzan
I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Watcher in the Shadows
Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful - as if the finite were for a second infinity - as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity - as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In solitude, struggles occur that no one else knows about. Inner battles are fought here that seldom become fodder for sermons or illustrations for books. God, who probes our deepest thoughts during protracted segments of solitude, opens our eyes to things that need attention. It is here He makes us aware of those things we try to hide from others.
— Charles R. Swindoll, Intimacy With The Almighty
Live by yourself and you bound to talk yourself and when ye commence that folks start it up that you're light in the head. But I reckon it's all right to talk to a dog since most folks do even if a dog don't understand and cain't answer if he did.
— Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark
Arcadio had seen her many times working in her parents' small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.
— Évariste Régis Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, 1844-1846
Though solitude, endured too long,Bids youthful joys too soon decay,Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue,And overclouds my noon of day;When kindly thoughts that would have way,Flow back discouraged to my breast;I know there is, though far away,A home where heart and soul may rest.Warm hands are there, that, clasped in mine,The warmer heart will not belie;While mirth, and truth, and friendship shineIn smiling lip and earnest eye.The ice that gathers round my heartMay there be thawed; and sweetly, then,The joys of youth, that now depart,Will come to cheer my soul again.
— Anne Brontë, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
Sometimes the stage terrifies me,” I confessed. “But being here alone like this, it’s freeing.”Solitude can be freeing,” he said.
— Lesa Howard, Phantom's Dance
Humans are all too happy to keep company until the company turns out to be less appealing than solitude.
— Thor Benson
But there remained a reflective solitude behind that laughter, that nagging sense of completion that didn't sit well on the shoulders of a woman who had just begun to open her eyes to the wide world.
— R.A. Salvatore, Siege of Darkness
Father and Ivy used to go off on their excursions, never knowing that I was relieved when they were gone. That I'd wear my nightgowns all day and read from dawn till dusk.
— Suzanne Palmieri, Empire Girls
Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.
— Walter Benjamin
Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—“base.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensible for my dialogue with nature.
— Caspar David Friedrich
Living without personal boundaries is like trying to hold my breath and gasp for air, at the same time, it doesn't work. My introverted nature requires solitary sanctuary, to breathe. My internal batteries need time to recharge if i am to give from a place of abundance.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that's where I renew my springs that never dry up. ~Pearl Buck
— Pearl S. Buck
A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays
I know gray areas too well. I write for silent audiences.
— Antonia Perdu
I place solitude in a frame on my desk and call it, the one I love.
— Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum
the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.
— Spencer Gordon, Cosmo
Solitude is the biggest medicine for once peace, It makes your heart pure and calm.
— Debolina Bhawal
So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.
— Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self
The capacity to form attachments on equal terms is considered evidence of emotional maturity. It is the absence of this capacity which is pathological. Whether there may be other criteria of emotional maturity, like the capacity to be alone, is seldom taken into account.
— Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self
In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.
— Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self
But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
— Robert Graves
Often people request prayers for deliverance, inner healing, or physical healing. But more frequently they simply want a man or woman to whom they can turn--not because of what this person is able to do but because of what he or she is: a person who makes them feel wanted, a friend to love them, one who generates an atmosphere of warmth and trust in which they are able to love in return.
— Brennan Manning, Souvenirs of Solitude: Finding Rest in Abba's Embrace
Only lost photographs that were never taken know what my mind speaks of when we are alone together.
— Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness
Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
you know the way of the wind in the night—the desolate alleys my soul takes
— John Geddes
In solitude, you will find yourself; in crowds, you will find others! You need both of them: Solitude and crowds; yourself and others! Without others, what to do with yourself? Without yourself, what to do with others?
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Solitude is the rebel of the freedom.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
you are a ring tone on the phone I didn’t answer
— John Geddes
Every day solitude for a particular time period is a good way to refresh physically and is a great opportunity to rise spiritually!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There are times i wish i was a master magician so i could disappear into the folds of time, without consequence, without missing a beat. As an introvert, i need so much time to myself. I feel expansive and peaceful in my own space, constricted and chained, when confined to social situations. I can't blossom when pressed against everyone else.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Of course, I'm not quite ready to forsake all the products of society, just yet. I have my clothes, my books, etc... But more and more I can see myself leaving much of the rest behind - leaving their makers, and the crucible from which they proceed. If at times, after all, I might benefit by the rays of the sun, must I seek also to reside in its nuclear core?
— Mark X., Citations: A Brief Anthology
...children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-- to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
If one sets aside timefor a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition,that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone,one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when beingalone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that onepractices it—like a secret vice!
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still; it goes deeper and makes for itself a deeper groove, delves. Delve meansa 'dig with a spade'; it means hard work. In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself. It needs sturdiness. You will be lonely, you will be depressed; you must expect it; if you were training your body it would ache and be tired. It is worth it. There is a Hindu proverb which says: 'You only grow when you are alone'.
— Rumer Godden, Thus far and no further
What is really scary is running naked inside yourself, revealing the real you.
— Wes Adamson
...solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone.
— Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage
Everybody in the world wants to be understood and to have others appreciate them.Being different is scary. Solitude is pain and loneliness.
— Mizuki Nomura
How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
The evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do.Inside my apartment I'd felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone, to be reassured. Or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world. Or it was neither of these--I was afraid I was dreaming. Indeed, considering the events of the day, it was likely that I was dreaming. I sometimes fly in my dreams, and each time I say to myself, "At last--it's happening in reality and not in a dream!"In any case, I needed to talk to someone, and I was alone. This is my habitual condition, by choice--or so I tell myself. Mere acquaintanceship leaves me unsatisfied, and few people are willing to accept the burdens and risks of friendship as I conceive of it.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
The importance of solitude is to help you to differentiate your own thoughts from those you have studied, read, heard, or unintentionally absorbed.
— Tonya Sheridan
I don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.
— Clive Barker
Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
You can't ever really have enough worth that when you're gone, the spot you left won't close over.
— Laura Florand, The Chocolate Kiss
And then the days came when I was alone.
— Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die.
— D.H. Lawrence
Solitude became, for me, an interesting mosaic of broken pieces, a place where the neglected parts of myself get collected—for better and for worse, sometimes barely tolerated and sometimes arranged into lovely patterns.
— Laurie A. Helgoe
Everyday, spend some time in solitude to repair the damages done by the crowds!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When you are alone, bless the solitude; when you are with someone, bless the togetherness! Think of the seagull: It flies alone happily; it flies with another happily too! Solitude is a food; togetherness is a food; man needs both and he must be happy with both!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Some people are so boring that you are more bored when you are with them … than when you are alone.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
So I forced myself to step out of my comfort zone and go out and connect with people. I realised that no one knew me here. I could become whoever I wanted to be for these people, and that became my courage.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
solitude is not absence of love, but its complement
— Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra
At life's most significant moments, we are always alone
— Paulo Coelho
Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
All that is important comes in quietness and waiting.
— Patrick Lindsay, Now Is the Time: 170 Ways to Seize the Moment
Solitude is an interesting companion. It is both enemy and friend, comforter and tormentor. I spent a lot of time in Dun Cinzci's meat locker trying to decide which. Fortunately, when I tired of solitude, I had guilt to keep me company. Guilt is an even more interesting acquaintance than solitude, let me tell you. Solitude is a harsh but essentially benign attendant. Guilt, on the other hand, is a living, breathing creature, cruel and remorseless. It eats you from the inside out; devours what little hope you have left. It feeds on you, growing stronger with every accursed replayed memory, every useless recrimination." ~ Cayal, The Immortal Prince
— Jennifer Fallon, The Immortal Prince
Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest.What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude.
— Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Relationship Time to Aloneness." Having a companion fixes you in time and that of the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.
— John Steinbeck
After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
I had a cup of tea, thought about my day and mostly about the horse whom, though I'd only known him a short time, I called my friend. I have few friends and am glad to have a horse for a friend. After the meal I smoked a cigarette and mused on the luxury it would be to go out, instead of talking to myself and boring myself to death with the same endless stories I'm forever telling myself. I am a very boring person, despite my enormous intelligence and distinguished appearance, and nobody knows this better than I. I've often told myself that if only I were given the opportunity, I'd perhaps become the centre of intellectual society. But by dint of talking to myself so much, I tend to repeat the same things all the time. But what can you expect? I'm a recluse.
— Leonora Carrington, House of Fear
Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.
— Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers
I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
— Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings
I owe my solitude to other people.
— Alan W. Watts
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post office, and at the sociable, and at the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
— James Salter, All That Is
In a cool solitude of treesWhere leaves and birds a music spin,Mind that was weary is at ease,New rhythms in the soul begin.
— William Kean Seymour, The Cats of Rome: New and Selected Poems
She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.
— Gabriel García Márquez
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I have attained it.
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
...I got to love solitude - to see the Moon rise and set - I had time to watch it trace the window square across the wall in silent grace...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
One will probably have to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)
— Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern
Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.
— Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
He had to hold his body very still, very still, like some vessel about to slosh over from too much motion. Gradually he managed to get control of his breathing. His excited heart beat more steadily; the pounding of the waves inside him subsided slowly. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusky reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened, and he entered. The next performance in the theatre of his soul was beginning.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer
If you are lonely, you feel separated from everybody. If you are in solitude, you feel you are in contact with the entire universe.
— Siren Waroe
In solitude, you accumulate energy to spend in crowds; and in crowds, you accumulate energy to spend in solitude!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Let us not be bored
— Joe Buberger
I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only - still, I left.
— Mihail Drumeş
You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind-- for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive-- even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing.Writing that springs from the surface of existence-- when there is no other way and deeper wells have dried up-- is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes the surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.
— Franz Kafka
It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
— Søren Kierkegaard
I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people.
— Sara Quin
Personally, I'd rather grow old alone than in the company of anyone I've met so far. I don't experience myself as lonely, incomplete, or unfulfilled, but I don't talk about that much. It seems to piss people off--especially men. (Kinsey Millhone)
— Sue Grafton, B is for Burglar
We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.
— Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar
The devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements: noise, hurry, crowds. He will not allow quietness.
— Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot
Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.
— Herta Müller, The Appointment
To find is the thing.
— Pablo Picasso
And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.
— David James Duncan, The River Why
No one can be happy in eternal solitude.
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
— James Russell Lowell
There are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin.
— Roman Payne
However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.
— Michael Foley
At first the solitudecharmed me like a prelude,but so much music wounded me.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
You are at my side, dear friends, and God is everywhere. Yet ultimately we are alone, making our way home by the candle of the heart. The light is steady and sure but extends only far enough to see the next step.Many times the light seems to go out. But another light, one held by a stranger or friend, a book or a song, a blackbird or a wild flower, comes close enough so that we can see our path by its light. And in time we realize that the light we have borrowed was always our own.
— Joan Borysenko, A Woman's Journey to God
He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool-though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
We born alone,we all die alone.
— dalin shu
He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.
— Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
Life has ill-prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers.
— Laurie R. King, Justice Hall
CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.GRACE: -Is that an order?CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]
— Tennessee Williams, Something Unspoken
Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.
— Michael Foley, The Age Of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard To Be Happy
The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
— Don DeLillo
I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable.
— Allen Shawn
There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself.
— David Ignatow
In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again. What was she seeking to salvage from the daily current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell of the dream?
— Anaïs Nin, Children of the Albatross
...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.
— Tana French, In the Woods
When your mind is quiet, when your mind is in silence, then the new arrives.
— Samael Ann Weor
Part of me remained forever at Latitude 80 degrees 08 minutes South: what survived of my youth, my vanity, perhaps, and certainly my skepticism. On the other hand, I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values. All this happened four years ago. Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more peace.
— Richard E. Byrd
Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Patience, grasshopper," said Maia. "Good things come to those who wait.""I always thought that was 'Good things come to those who do the wave,'" said Simon. "No wonder I've been so confused all my life.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
— Aristotle
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
— Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Why is patience so important?""Because it makes us pay attention.
— Paulo Coelho
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
— Margaret Thatcher
She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
— Elizabeth  Taylor, A Wreath of Roses
Waiting and hoping is a hard thing to do when you've already been waiting and hoping for almost as long as you can bear it.
— Jenny Nimmo, Charlie Bone and the Time Twister
It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
— Hal Borland
Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind.
— David G.  Allen
I’m saying that I can wait. For now. But when things get back to normal—assuming that ever happens—I want my shot. We can make each other happy, Faythe. I know it. And I’m done walking away from things I want just because they don’t come easily. You’re worth the work.
— Rachel Vincent, Prey
He who can have patience can have what he will.
— Benjamin Franklin
Just because you're an adult doesn't mean you're grown up. Growing up means being patient, holding your temper, cutting out the self-pity, and quitting with the righteous indignation.''Why do so many people seem to love righteous indignation?''Because if you can prove you're a victim, all rules are off. You can lash out at people. You don't have to be accountable for anything.
— Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
— Gustave Flaubert
Be worthy love, and love will come.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
— Edmund Burke
Life it too short to deal with crazy people.
— Karen E. Quinones Miller