Quotations About / On: SOLITUDE

Ah! you can die, the world can collapse, I have lost the one I love. I must now live in this terrible solitude where memory is torture.

God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.

But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.

She knew that Marcel needed her and that she needed this need, that it kept her alive night and day; especially at night when he did not want to be alone, or to age or to die, with that stubborn look he had, and that she sometimes recognized on other men's faces, the only look common to all the madmen hidden behind airs of reason, until the delirium rises and throws them, desperate, to a woman's body to bury, without desire, the frightening things that solitude and night have shown them.

Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.

Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel—or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime.

In his lonely solitude, the solitary man feeds upon himself; in the thronging multitude, the many feed upon him. Now choose.

Piety practised in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendour of beneficence.

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue.... Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.

We will never be able to avoid conflicts entirely because parents' needs and children's needs are so often opposed. When we need to hurry, they want to dawdle. When we crave ten minutes of solitude after a trying day, they issue eighteen demands for immediate attention. When we get a long-distance phone call, they interrupt us with a crisis.