"Platonic England, house of solitudes, rests in its laurels and its injured stone"
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Solitude quotes
Solitude
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Solitude quotes (page 21 of 48)
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"He that fancies such a sufficiency in himself that he can live without all the world is greatly mistaken; but he that imagines himself so necessary that other people cannot live without him is a great deal more mistaken."
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"If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous."
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"I'm not collegial, I don't hang out. I'm soloist, I like my solitude, I don't really hang around with comedians."
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"If you start with community and want to be faithful to community, you have to realize that what binds you together is not mutual compatibility or common tasks, but God. In order to stay in touch with that call to community, we always have to return to solitude."
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"In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness."
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"Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger."
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"If he must be alone, he would make solitude his armor."
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"Aloneness, like life, becomes more interesting when you realize it's a present."
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"The man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone,--good-by,--fare-well. But the Landlord can afford to live without privacy."
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"There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows."
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"The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got."
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"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. [It allows you to] be the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark of your own streams and oceans; [to] explore your own higher latitudes; [to] be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."
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"Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows."
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"Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon."
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"I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. Yet some of my acquaintance would fain hustle me into the almshouse for the sake of society, as if I were pining for that diet, when I seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. However, they do not believe a word I say."
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"To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done,and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements."
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"What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?"
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"Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them."
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"Books connect us with others, but that connection is created in solitude, one reader in one chair hearing one writer, what John Irving refers to as one genius speaking to another."
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