I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
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How the old mountains drip with sunset, And the brake of dun! How the hemlocks are tipped in tinsel By the wizard sun! How the old steeples hand the scarlet, Till the ball is full, -- Have I the lip of the flamingo That I dare to tell? Then, how the fire ebbs like billows, Touching all the grass With a departing, sapphire feature, As if a duchess pass! How a small dusk crawls on the village Till the houses blot; And the odd flambeaux no men carry Glimmer on the spot! Now it is night in nest and kennel, And where was the wood, Just a dome of abyss is nodding Into solitude! -- These are the visions baffled Guido; Titian never told; Domenichino dropped the pencil, Powerless to unfold.
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O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings
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It is God who lets the wild apples grow, to satisfy the hungry. He showed her a wild apple-tree, with the boughs bending under the weight of the fruit. Here she took her midday meal, placing props under the boughs, and then went into the darkest part of the forest. There it was so still that she could hear her own footsteps, as well as the rustling of every dry leaf which bent under her feet. Not one bird was to be seen, not one ray of sunlight could find its way through the great dark boughs of the trees; the lofty trunks stood so close together that when she looked before her it appeared as though she were surrounded by sets of palings one behind the other. O, here was solitude such as she had never before known!
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Most of man's problems in the modern world arise from the constant and unavoidable exposure to the stimuli of urban and industrial civilization, the varied aspects of environmental pollution, the physiological disturbances associated with sudden changes in ways of life, the estrangement from the conditions and natural cycles under which human evolution took place, the emotional trauma and the paradoxical solitude in congested cities, the monotony, boredom and compulsory leisure
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Two Paradises t'were in one, to live in Paradise alone.
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Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
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I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
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I love tranquil solitude And such society As is quiet, wise, and good.
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Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
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Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
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To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.
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Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the real world since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.
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When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without -- oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
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Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.
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Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.
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There is a great solitude about such a shore. The woods are never solitary- they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery- we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only- a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels.
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I run because it's my passion, and not just a sport. Every time I walk out the door, I know why I'm going where I'm going and I'm already focused on that special place where I find my peace and solitude. Running, to me, is more than just a physical exercise... it's a consistent reward for victory!
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And she (the Roman Catholic Church) may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
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In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. Tibullus by all means use sometimes to be alone.
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Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
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If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution -- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.
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Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
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In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find the ultimate questioner - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question.
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To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
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Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.
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Who knows what true loneliness is -- not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.
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We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
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The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
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A man by himself is in bad company.
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