#solitude

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#energy #socialising #solitude #art

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

#art

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#silence #solitude #art

When from our better selves we have too long Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, How gracious, how benign, is Solitude ↗

— William Wordsworth

#solitude #business

The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#life #sadness #solitude #spirit #change

They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think. ↗

— Ellis Peters

#beer #confession #courage #drinking #quietness

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting... ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#dreams

Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. (p. 235) ↗

— Daniel J. Siegel

#solitude #experience

My fear of loneliness is like a disease. ↗

— Irene Tomkinson

#loneliness #solitude #family

In the wide pile, by others heeded not, Hers was one sacred solitary spot, Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves contain For moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain. ↗

— Walter Scott

#library #solitude #food