#solitude

No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone. ↗

— Daphne Kalotay

#privacy #solitude #freedom

...freedom is of more account than the height of a roof beam. I ought to know; mine cost me eighteen years' slavery. The man who lives on his own land is an independent man. He is his own master. If I can keep my sheep alive through winter and can pay what has been stipulated from year to year - then I pay what has been stipulated; and I have kept my sheep alive. No, it is freedom that we are all after, Titla. He who pays his way is a king. He who keeps his sheep alive through the winter lives in a palace. ↗

— Halldór Laxness

#freedom #independence #sheep #solitude #freedom

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#love

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#loneliness #solitude #intelligence

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#intelligence #solitude #intelligence

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#solitude #life

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. ↗

— Tennessee Williams

#loneliness #solitary-confinement #solitude #life

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that is so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#love

Tant que mes jambes me permettent de fuir, tant que mes bras me permettent de combattre, tant que l'expérience que j'ai du monde me permet de savoir ce que je peux craindre ou désirer, nulle crainte : je puis agir. Mais lorsque le monde des hommes me contraint à observer ses lois, lorsque mon désir brise son front contre le monde des interdits, lorsque mes mains et mes jambes se trouvent emprisonnées dans les fers implacables des préjugés et des cultures, alors je frissonne, je gémis et je pleure. Espace, je t'ai perdu et je rentre en moi-même. Je m'enferme au faite de mon clocher où, la tête dans les nuages, je fabrique l'art, la science et la folie. ↗

— Henri Laborit

#fantasy #folly #solitude #art

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. ↗

— William Wordsworth

#loss #nature #solitude #nature