#solitude

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

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#genius #learning #solitude #education

Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night. ↗

— John Burroughs

#god #nature #religion #solitude #spirituality

Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine. ↗

— Honoré de Balzac

#society #solitude #society

Sure, it sucked to be lost, but I'd long ago realized I preferred it to depending on anyone else to get me where I needed to go. That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened- good, bad, or anywhere in between- it was always, if nothing else, all your own. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#self-reliance #solitude #independence

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self. ↗

— May Sarton

#loneliness #solitude #rich

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow. ↗

— Kahlil Gibran

#solitude #sorrow #strong

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#truth #uncertainty

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#enquiry #silence #solitude #solitude

You'll get used to it. In the end you won't even notice it anymore," he said. "How is that possible? It will always be there, right before my eyes." "Exactly," said Mattia. "Which is precisely why you won't see it anymore. ↗

— Paolo Giordano

#the-solitute-of-prime-numbers #solitude