Quotes about Solitude
If you want to know anything about community, you have to realize that the contemplative side is essential. Community without retreating and quiet time never survives.
- Henri Nouwen
Presidents have only two moments of personal seclusion. One is prayer; the other fishing - and they cannot pray all the time!
- Herbert Hoover
This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that's what I had.
- Steve Jobs
He wanted to close his eyes and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him, but that was an act of a coward and he would not yield to it.
- Arthur C. Clarke
Please leave me alone; let me go on to the stars.
- Arthur C. Clarke
I had no friends who would call upon me and break the monotony of my daily existence.
- Arthur Conan Doyle
My sorrow is my castle.
- Soren Kierkegaard
The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'.
- Soren Kierkegaard
I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.
- George Eliot
Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.
- Henry David Thoreau
I have no help to send, therefore I must go myself.
- JRR Tolkien
In solitude we discover that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call.
- Henri Nouwen