Quotes about Solitude

Just become quiet, still, and solitary, and the world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Respect the child.  Wait and see the new product of Nature.  Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions.  Respect the child.  Be not too much his parent.  Trespass not on his solitude.

A place of solitude offers a retreat from the opposing forces and diverse demands of living, an entry into a state of peace and unity.  Mind and body can retire from confusion and conflict to a sanctuary of clarity and harmony

To seek solitude like a wild animal.  That is my only ambition.

I am truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.  I am truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude - feelings which increase with the years.

I have a house where I go,
When there's too many people,
I have a house where I go
Where no one can be;
I have a house where I go,
Where nobody ever says "no"
Where no one says anything - so
There is no one but me.

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound.  Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses.  You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon.  There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind.  The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.

For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world.  My body requires no attention.  It's not hungry.  It's neither warm or cold.  It's resigned to being left undisturbed.  Why have I troubled to bring it here?  I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet.  This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels.  It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.

Then what am I - the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands?  Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation?  There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.

While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds.  It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.

Delight in meditation and solitude.  Compose yourself, be happy.  You are a seeker.

It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, ina government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

I went to the woods because I wished to live dliberately... and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

"It is my hope that this book walks that fine line between respecting the uniqueness of your individual journey and speaking to that part of you that may need company as you set your foot on the path. My story only provides a template, but there may well be themes that resonate for you. Perhaps knowing someone went this way will invite you to walk a little bit further into your unique unknown."

"Sometimes truth has to stand alone in order to be recognized and realized as being Truth."

Something in us doesn't want to be civilized, linked too closely with Apollo and all his humanitarian accomplishments--medicine, music, ideas. It doesn't want any kind of union, but desperately tries to preserve its individuality and integrity. Something in us wants to be wooden, untalkative, and impenetrable. It wants to revert to dumb nature. Something in us doesn't want to be loved or desired. A tree's beauty is purely unintended and purposeless.
Daphne is wooden. She is that which doesn't want to be communicative, available, friendly, present, or articulate. Instinctively she flees from the most noble of attentions, the most humane of admirers. She would rather be like a tree than a person, an it rather than a thou. The Daphne spirit is so pure that it has no use for the sentimentality of relationship.
Modern psychological thinking doesn't appreciate the necessity presented in this myth. We consider it normal and healthy to be intimate with each other and communicate well. We interpret flight from intimacy as neurotic, abnormal, and practically immoral. But within this myth, flight from interpersonal contact is the norm. Resistance to humanitarian sensitivity is valid. Disappearing from the human scene somehow protects and preserves Daphne in a completely acceptable way.
Rather than judge each other and ourselves for our failure to be sociable, we might reconsider our biases and assumptions, even our sentimentality, about relationship. Perhaps some of our narcissism is a symptomatic attempt recover as strong unrelated sense of self. How can we reach out to another anyway, if we don't have strong devotion to our individuality?

I cannot find the Monastery of Heaped Fragrance,
Miles up now into the clouds of the summit.
There is no footpath through the ancient woods.
Where did the bell sound,
Deep in the sound, deep in the mountain?
The voice of the torrent gulps over jagged stones;
Sunlight hardly warms the bluish pines.
As dusk deepens in these unfathomable mazes,
I practice meditation
To subdue the dragon of desire.

Seclusion is the price of greatness.

"Solitude is learning that we are not alone when we are alone."

Every man should have his own Holy Place where he keeps lonely vigil, harkens for the Voices, and offers prayer and praise.

"Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."

Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

The Tao gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things.

All things have their backs to the female
and stand facing the male.
When male and female combine,
all things achieve harmony.

Ordinary men hate solitude.
But the Master makes use of it,
embracing his aloneness, realizing
he is one with the whole universe.

Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom.

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.

A pretext--not a cause--is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.

Some praise me, some blame me. I
go the other way.

I love people. I love my family, my children... but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew  your springs that never dry up.

The values of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.  A few moments of desultory conversation...may calm an inner storm.  But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it.  So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.  The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.