Loneliness Quotes - page 24
To pray means to open your hands before God. It means slowly relaxing the tension which squeezes your hands together and accepting your existence with an increasing readiness, not as a possession to defend, but as a gift to receive. Above all, prayer is a way of life which allows you to find a stillness in the midst of the world where you open your hands to God's promises and find hope for yourself, your neighbor and your world. In prayer, you encounter God not only in the small voice and the soft breeze, but also in the midst of the turmoil of the world, in the distress and joy of your neighbor and in the loneliness of your own heart.
Henri Nouwen
After fighting, scheming and murdering in pursuit of the secure tenure of absolute power, he found himself at last on a lonely pinnacle over an abyss, with no use for his power and security unattainable. His genius was such that he ended an epoch and began another - but one of unceasing war and misery, from which exhaustion produced an approach to order after two generations and peace at last under the Roman Empire. He himself never found peace. One is tempted to see him, in medieval terms, as the man who sold his soul to the Devil for power: the Devil kept his part of the bargain but ultimately claimed his own. But to the historian, prosaically such allegory, we must put it differently: to him, when he has done all the work - work that must be done, and done carefully - of analysing the play of faction and the system of government, Alexander illustrates with startling clarity the ultimate loneliness of supreme power.
Ernst Badian
These descents of mine beneath the sea seemed to partake of a real cosmic character. First of all there was the complete and utter loneliness and isolation, a feeling wholly unlike the isolation felt when removed from fellow men by mere distance ... . It was a loneliness more akin to a first venture upon the moon or Venus than that from a plane in mid-ocean or a stance on Mount Everest: no whit more wonderful than these feats, but different.
William Beebe
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
