"Two touch the string, The harp is dumb."
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Solitude quotes
Solitude
957 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Solitude quotes (page 20 of 48)
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"Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion."
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"There is a vast difference between an Apostolic life and the solitude of the Carthusians. The latter is truly very holy but is not suited to those whom God has called to the former, which is in itself more excellent."
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"The seeds of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public."
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"When female minds are embittered by age or solitude, their malignity is generally exerted in a rigorous and spiteful superintendence of domestic trifles."
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"Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves"
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"To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude; it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures."
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"...solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. *** Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again."
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"Solitude was corrupting me."
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"The bloom of Monticello is chilled by my solitude."
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"Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes."
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"It is sweet to mingle tears with tears; Griefs, where they wound in solitude, Wound more deeply."
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"Even though I get a lot done with my solitude, and I make the best use of it possible, I always think solitude is an interlude in a period of time, which is populated by others."
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"The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her."
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"If you are bombarded by so many thoughts in solitude, you are in ignorance. If you are calm even amidst a crowd then you are in knowledge."
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"We've known about the transcendent power of solitude for centuries; it's only recently that we've forgotten it."
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"Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction."
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"In solitude a dialogue always arises, because even in solitude there are always two."
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"But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness."
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"If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up."
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