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Quotation of the day
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
Daily Quote:
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests" (Vidal, Gore - Language)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Solitude

A man by himself is in bad company.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
A writer who writes, I am alone... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.
An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear. Dare to look in thy chest; for 'Tis thine own: And tumble up and down what thou findst there. Who cannot rest till he good fellows find, he breaks up house, turns out of doors his mind.
Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.
Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily.
Go away, I'm all right!
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone, I never found the companionable as solitude.
I have never found a companion so companionable as solitude.
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
I want to be left alone.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
I'm still the little southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who really didn't feel like she belonged.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.
If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.
If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.
In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.
In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.
In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. Tibullus by all means use sometimes to be alone.
In solitude, where we are least alone.
In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?
In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Life without a friend is death without a witness.
May God be gracious to each lonely one who walks in silence towards the setting sun.
No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.
O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings
Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore.
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict -- girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.
Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio, or looked at a TV They had loneliness and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would mark.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
Solitude begets whimsies.
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.
Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
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.
Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.
Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.
Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.
Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.
Solitude is the despair of fools, the torment of the wicked, and the joy of the good.
Solitude is un-American.
Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.
Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
The best thinking has been done in solitude.
The good and the wise lead quiet lives.
The higher we rise, the more isolated we become; all elevations are cold.
The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
The right to be alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.
The strong man is strongest when alone.
The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.
The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
There is convincing evidence that the search for solitude is not a luxury but a biological need. Just as humans posses a herding instinct that keeps us close to others most of the time, we also have a conflicting drive to seek out solitude. If the distance between ourselves and others becomes too great, we experience isolation and alienation, yet if the proximity to others becomes too close, we feel smothered and trapped.
This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.
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.
To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self.
True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.
Two Paradises t'were in one, to live in Paradise alone.
Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.
We never touch but at points.
We walk alone in the world.
Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.