Solitude Quotes - page 27
Not a May-game is this man's life; but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men, with inexpressible soft pity,-as they cannot love him: but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars keen-glancing, from the Immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the Eternities. Deep calls for him unto Deep.
Thomas Carlyle
Youth is ever apt to judge in haste,
And lose the medium in the wild extreme,
Do not repent, but regulate your passion:
Though love is reason, its excess is rage.
Give me, at least, your promise to reflect,
In cool, impartial solitude, and still.
No last decision till we meet again.
Aaron Hill (writer)
I have only one recourse, to remember and to believe. To hold on with all my strength to the memory of the tragedy of the Room.
I believe that the only thing which confronts the heart and the reason is the shadow of that which the heart and the reason cry for. I believe that around us there is only one word, the immense word which takes us out of our solitude, NOTHING. I believe that this does not signify our nothingness or our misfortune, but, on the contrary, our realisation and our deification, since everything is within us.
Henri Barbusse
True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.
E. O. Wilson
A cry went up in the airy solitude of the high plains: 'Let's Murder the moonlight!' Some ran to nearby cascades; gigantic wheels were raised, and turbines transformed the rushing waters into magnetic pulses that rushed up wires, up high poles, up to shining, humming globes.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
I would rather suffer sweet silent solitude,
Deathly defiant from drowning out.
Filthy sounds stumbling, ugly and cruel
Between the lips of your beautiful mouth.Deep down within me words move in phases,
Frozen and still until they decide
To melt and drip over the pages,
Until that moment they live inside.
Lucinda Williams
Sometimes when we have been overcome by pride or impatience, and we want to improve our rough and bearish manners, we complain that we require solitude, as if we should find the virtue of patience there where nobody provokes us: and we apologize for our carelessness, and say that the reason of our disturbance does not spring from our own impatience, but from the fault of our brethren. And while we lay the blame of our fault on others, we shall never be able to reach the goal of patience and perfection.The chief part then of our improvement and peace of mind must not be made to depend on another's will, which cannot possibly be subject to our authority, but it lies rather in our own control. And so the fact that we are not angry ought not to result from another's perfection, but from our own virtue, which is acquired, not by somebody else's patience, but by our own long-suffering.
John Cassian
O fathering friend and scientist of good,
Who in solitude, one bygone summer's day,
And in the throes of bodily anguish, passed away
From dream and conflict and research-lit lands
Of ethnological learning, - even as you stood
Selfless and ardent, resolute and gay,
So in this hour, in strange survival stands
Your ghost, whom I am powerless to repay.
Siegfried Sassoon
Once again I say that with death Jesus conquered death, and rose from the grave a spirit and a power. And He walked in our solitude and visited the gardens of our passion.
He lies not there in that cleft rock behind the stone.
We who love Him beheld Him with these our eyes which He made to see; and we touched Him with these our hands which He taught to reach forth.
Kahlil Gibran
I have often neglected my appearance. I admit it, and I also admit that it is "shocking." But look here, lack of money and poverty have something to do with it too, as well as a profound disillusionment, and besides, it is sometimes a good way of ensuring the solitude you need, of concentrating more or less on whatever study you are immersed in.
Vincent van Gogh
A painting by Rembrandt not only stops the time that made the subject flow into the future, but makes it flow back to the remotest ages. By means of this operation Rembrandt achieves solemnity. He thus discovers why, at every moment, every event is solemn: he knows it from his own solitude.
Rembrandt
People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Loneliness is emptiness; and moral nature has as much horror of it as physical nature. Solitude is habitable only for the man of genius who fills it with his ideas - daughters of the spiritual world - or for the beholder of divine works who finds it illuminated by the day of heaven, animated by the breath and by the voice of God. Save these two men, so close to paradise, loneliness is to torture what morale is to physique. Between loneliness and torture there is all the difference between nervous illness and surgical illness. It is suffering multiplied by infinity. The body touches infinity through the nervous system, just as the mind enters it through thought.
Honoré de Balzac
