#solitude

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#eagles #great #great men #like #lofty

To be exempt from the Passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing Solitude. ↗

— Richard Steele

#only #others #passions #pleasing #solitude

One can acquire everything in solitude except character. ↗

— Stendhal

#character #everything #except #solitude

In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself. ↗

— Laurence Sterne

#itself #lean #learns #mind #solitude

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

#solitude #dreams

...since I realized that he (Picasso) lived in a self-enclosed world and that his solitude was therefore total, I wanted to explore my own solitude. ↗

— Françoise Gilot

#life

My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that’s worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to? ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#life-and-living #life-story #loneliness #solitude #story

solitude is not absence of love, but its complement ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#love

For now she need not think of anybody. She coud 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... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#solitude

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this. ↗

— Paul Auster

#writing #solitude