5 January 2022
"Now, more than ever, we need our solitude. Being alone gives us the power to regulate and adjust our lives. It can teach us fortitude and the ability to satisfy our own needs. A restorer of energy, the stillness of alone experiences provides us with much-needed rest. It brings forth our longing to explore, our curiosity about the unknown, our will to be an individual, our hopes for freedom. Alone time is fuel for life."
“Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our
performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new
discoveries, to unearth original answers.”
― Ester Buchholz, In “The Call of Solitude” (1997).
"There
is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more."
- George Gordon Byron
" Solitude is perhaps a
misnomer. To me, being alone means togetherness - the
re-coming-togetherness of myself and nature, of myself and being, the reuniting
of myself with all other selves. Solitude especially means putting the
parts of my mind back together, unifying the pieces of my mind back together,
unifying the pieces of myself scattered by anger and fear, until I can once
again see that the little things are little and the big things are big."
-
Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself
"To
have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known
oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.”
- Joseph Krutch, The Desert Year
"I got fascinated by silence; by what happens to the
human spirit, to identity and personality when the talking stops, when you
press the off button, when you venture out into that enormous emptiness."
-
Sara Maitland, How to Be Alone
"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and
uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside
influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the
secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born."
- Nikola Tesla
"Don't underestimate the value of Doing
Nothing,
of just going along,
listening to all the things you can't hear,
and not bothering.” Jane Powers, in “Pooh’s Little Instruction Book"
"Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.” Pooh, again.
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