Everyone needs a place where they can be alone.
This file includes Solitude and Silence
Page Toppers
- Blissful Solitude
- Desperately Seeking Solitude
- Far and Away
- Far from the Madding Crowd
- In God Alone Is My Soul At Rest
- My Special Spot
- Pause for beauty
- A Place of My Own
- Rejuvenation
- Relax and Unwind
- Renewal
- Solitude and Reflection
- Strength in Solitude
- Time Out
- Tranquility of Solitude
Quotes
- Better be alone than in bad company. (Thomas Fuller)
- A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
- Everyone needs a place where they can be alone
- Everyone needs their own spot. (Robert Whalen)
- I am not anti-social - I am just really pro-me.
- I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls. (Henry David Thoreau)
- I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
- I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. (Albert Einstein)
- I was never less alone than when by myself. (Edward Gibbon)
- I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. (Henry David Thoreau)
- I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone. (Robin Williams)
- I was never less alone than while by myself. (Edward Gibson)
- In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely. (Geoffrey Francis Fisher)
- In solitude we are least alone. (Lord Byron)
- 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. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- It is in solitude that the works of the hand, heart, and mind are always conceived, and in solitude that individuality must be affirmed. (Robert Lindner)
- Language...has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone. (Paul Johannes Tillich)
- Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company. (Lord Byron)
- Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other. (Han Suyin)
- Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. (Lorraine Hansberry)
- Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude. (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)
- Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. (Dag Hammarskjold)
- The right to be alone--the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man. (Louis D. Brandeis)
- 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. (Thomas De Quincey)
- To transform the emptiness of loneliness, to the fullness of aloneness. Ah, that is the secret of life.
- Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth. (Kahlil Gibran)
- There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire. (Jules Renard)
- This land is your land. This land is my land. So stay on your land.
- To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet. (Charles Caleb Colton)
- We visit others as a matter of social obligation. How long has it been since we have visited with ourselves? (Morris Adler)
- With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves. (Eric Hoffer)
- The worst loneliness is not to comfortable with yourself. (Mark Twain)
Nobody Knows it But Me
(Patrick O'Leary)
There's a place that I travel,
When I want to roam
And nobody knows if but me.
The roads don't go there,
And the signs stay home
And nobody knows it but me.
It's far, far away and way, way afar,
It's over the moon and the sea,
And wherever you are going,
That's wherever you are
And nobody knows it but me.
Solitude
(from The Adventure of Being Alone by Eric Sloane)
I find comfort and peace in solitude. There are those who would live by the side of the road and watch the race of men go by, but my idea of a perfect place to live is a farmstead where I can't see another house. Even a distant chimney shatters my sense of tranquility; at night, faraway lighted windows are prying eyes watching me.
You can tell a 'loner' by his work: a writer who enjoys being alone writes as if talking to himself, and a painter of the same sort views landscapes without benefit of people to enliven the scene. My countryside subjects seldom have anyone there, and for a while I wondered if I had lost the knack of painting people. Presenting an art award to me, Louis Nizer brought that up, and I squirmed. "Sloane seldom has people in his paintings," he said. Then the famous lawyer with the gift of words delighted me. "But there is always someone in Sloane's paintings," he added. "It is you!"
Knowing the difference between alone and lonely can be more important than other things a student learns, and when I think of the time I spent with Latin, I wonder why the simple subject of living was never considered a proper school subject. The appalling number of recent dropouts, runaways and teen-age suicides might indicate the need for children to know the fine art of coping with being alone.
Solitude in youth is painful because the art of living comfortably with it has not yet been learned; it is usually only in maturity that solitude becomes delicious. At one time, when life was confusing and my mind lacked decision, I went to people for advice. I have since learned that the answers were usually within me all the while. Now when I am perplexed, I seek seclusion and, in the eloquence of silence, I wait for the replies to arrive. And they do.
I Am a Rock
(Simon and Garfunkel)
A winter's day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
Don't talk of love,
Well I've heard the word before;
It's sleeping in my memory.
I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.
At one time I would have used this song to illustrate the meaning of the word 'solitude'. It was only as I got older that I learned that being alone because you don't trust people is vastly different from being alone because you are comfortable with yourself. Now I think of this song as an example of how not to live your life. It took me a long time to realize that if you don't let yourself experience pain you can't fully experience joy, and if you don't let yourself cry you can't really laugh. I am still somewhat of a 'rock' at times but I am no longer an 'island'--thanks to the wonderful friends and family members who were waiting for me to let them into my life.
Alone versus Lonely
(Denny Davis)
Solitude is something I usually enjoy
I rarely feel lonely when I am alone
But in that bed with him
I always felt isolated and sad
Now alone in bed I feel relaxed
And free to be me
Still sometimes sad and lonely
But no longer isolated
Whoever it was that said
"I'd rather be lonely for someone
Than lonely with someone"
knew what they were talking about.
For more stuff about loneliness see Missing You.
Rough Country
(Dana Gioia)
Give me a landscape made of obstacles,
of steep hills and jutting glacial rock,
where the low-running streams are quick to flood
the grassy fields and bottom lands.
A place no engineers can master--where the roads
must twist like tendrils up the mountainside
on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.
Where tall black trunks of lightning-scalded pine
push through the tangled woods to make a roost
for hawks and swarming crows.
And sharp inclines
where twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,
scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly
to find an unexpected waterfall,
not half a mile from the nearest road,
a spot so hard to reach that no one comes.
A hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies
and nesting jays, a sign that there is still
one piece of property that won't be owned.
Songs about Solitude
- Beautiful Solitude - Jennifer Haines (2004)
- Blissful Solitude - Edmond Paul Nicodemi (2004)
- Desert solitudes - Bernie Krause (1997)
- Driving in Solitude - The Hermit (2001)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Jane Wiedlin (1985)
- Parallel Solitudes - Edmond Paul Nicodemi (2004)
- Solitude - Edwin McCain (1995)
- Solitude and Fear - Neon Synthesis (2006)
- Solitude and Reflection - Amie Ridley (2008)
- Song for Solitude - Rocky Gordon (2007)
- Strength in Solitude - Panic (2006)
- Summer Solitude - Tyler Rice (2000)
- Sunday Morning Solitude - Richard Frey (2008)
- Sweet Solitude - Jeff Barnhart (2006)
- Tranquility of Solitude - Rev Hammer (1994)
- Unbroken Solitude - Tim Janis (2005)
- Winter Solitudes - Luke Parkin (2006)
(Anna Quindlen from the Wichita Eagle-Beacon 9 Aug 1987)
I got in a lot of trouble when I was a kid for not getting enough fresh air. There was a big chair in our living room, overstuffed and worn, and even on the nicest day of the year I could be found there, my legs draped over one arm of the chair, reading.
I read a great deal, with no particular sense of originality or discernment. I read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, A Little Princess and A Wrinkle in Time. I read pretty awful stuff, like magazines for teenagers and I read pretty adult stuff like Wuthering Heights. I still remember reading Ulysses when I was thirteen and thinking, " What a weird book."
My mother was thinking, "What a weird child." When the sun was shining and the neighborhood kids were playing "Monkey in the Middle," my mother was always yelling at me to go outdoors. She did not understand the appeal of the great indoors.
To force the issue one summer, my parents sent me to camp. Thinking of it even today is, as Evelyn Waugh's Bright Young Things say, "too, too sick-making." All those people and all that activity all the time. I'll never forget it.
I still read, constantly; if my kids ever go into analysis, I am sure they will say they don't remember my face because it was always hidden by a book. Obviously, this is in part because I like books. But another reason is that I like to be alone. I like to go deep inside myself and not be accompanied there by anyone else.
But I am the oldest of five children, and when I was young I had about as much chance of being alone as I did of being a lion tamer. Reading was for me than a way of lifting myself out of a crowded environment into a place where I could be by myself.
No wonder my mother was concerned. Being by yourself was considered, at my age and in my family, aberrant behavior. Camp was normal. Camp was fun. Camp was crowded. Camp was horrible.
We pay lip service to the notion that privacy is important, but I don't really think we believe it. When anyone lives alone, we have a tendency to think he or she is just waiting to meet the right roommate; we have an impulse to pair off our friends or to introduce them to others. Single people eating in restaurants are assumed to be there for lack of a companion, not because they like their own company.
It is difficult for us to accept that a great many outwardly gregarious people often are inwardly private, that they have a chocolate-covered-almond kind of character. This happens to be the case with me, although societal conditioning has made me think about these two parts of myself as a little like the geography of the state of Michigan.
I am so gregarious that I was once the perfect mourner at an Irish wake, even though I realized when I approached the coffin that I was in the wrong viewing room. At the same time, I love solitude so much that one of my favorite parts of the week is when I have finished my work before the sitter is due to leave and I can hide out in my room for a half hour reading a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery.
Actually when I lived alone I was lonely a fair amount of the time, but it felt restorative. Perhaps I was making up for all those years of living in a crowded house, and all the years to come when, I suspected, I would live in one again. Because of youth or duty or love, I have often lived in crowded houses, in which a book was partly an excuse for staring into the middle distance, zoning out, being inside your own skin.
I have cultivated pastimes that make this type of behavior socially acceptable. I do needlework, watch television and, yes, read--all excuses for chewing the cud, ruminating over whatever crosses my mental screen.
Or, like a narcoleptic, I can simply lapse into my middle-distance attitude. My eyes unfocus and my mouth drops open just a bit. I look like a fish that was sideswiped by the Queen Elizabeth II and never knew what hit it. My family calls this my "zone look." It means" do not disturb."
I wonder if this is hereditary or whether I simply belong to a family of essentially solitary people placed by fate within large and voluble groups.
My father, for example, fishes; it is a pursuit some people do not understand--luring a cold-blooded creature to its death on the end of a piece of string. But fishing has very little to do with fish, at least the way my dad practices it. It has to do with sinking within yourself, charting your course. And I'm all for that.
I also have a child who habitually lapses into the zone look, although at his age I cannot imagine what he is thinking. Friends have started asking me when he will begin lessons: swimming, piano, art and the like.
I want him to have the best of everything, but the best of everything for me was often staring off into the middle distance. I want him to have lots of time for that. If I were asked what I am most afraid of his missing in his life, I think I would answer "solitude." I would say the same for me.
Page Toppers
- All is Calm
- Be Still and Know that I Am God
- Enjoy the Silence
- In the Quiet Morning
- In the Quiet of the Dawn
- Listen to the Silence
- My Soul in Stillness Waits
- Quiet Hills
- Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars
- A Quiet Place to Sit and Think
- Silence is Golden
- Some Quiet Place
- The Sounds of Silence
- There's a Kind of Hush
Quotes
- The ability to speak several languages is admirable, but the ability to hold one's tongue in one language is priceless.
- Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence. (John Lahr)
- All Heaven and Earth are still, though not in sleep, But breathless, as we grow when feeling most. (Lord Byron)
- Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words? (Marcel Marceau)
- Everybody should have his personal sounds to listen for--sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive or quite and calm.... One of the greatest sounds of them all--and to me it is a sound--is utter, complete silence. (Andre Kostelanetz)
- Great souls endure in silence. (Friedrich Schiller)
- An inability to stay quiet is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind. (Walter Bagehot)
- In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely. (Geoffrey Francis Fisher)
- My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence. (Henry Ford)
- Now all my teachers are dead except silence. (W.S. Merwin)
- Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude. (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)
- Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. (Dag Hammarskjold)
- Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Silence is a friend who will never betray. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time. (Thomas Carlyle)
- Silence is exhilarating at first--as noise is--but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep. (Edward Hoagland)
- Silence is more eloquent than words. (Thomas Carlyle)
- Silence is not a thing we make; it is something into which we enter. It is always there. All we can make is noise. (Mother Maribel of Wantage)
- Silence is our deepest nature, our home, our common ground, our peace. Silence reveals. Silence heals. (Gunilla Norris)
- Silence is the genius of fools and one of the virtues of the wise. (Pope Boniface VIII)
- Silence is the only thing that can't be misquoted!
- Silent company is often more healing than words of advice.
- Speech may be musical, but silence is magical.
- True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. (William Penn)
- Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
- To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self. (Hamilton Mabie)
- To sit quiet and think, is the hardest thing a person can do, for when he does, all the Demons of the universe, show up and try to keep him from the truth. But these Demons must be faced, then slayed, in order to live a life worth living. (R.H. Lascelle)
- We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...We need silence to be able to touch souls. (Mother Teresa)
Extremes
(James Whitcomb Riley)
A little boy once played so loud
That the thunder, up in a thundercloud,
Said, "Since I can't be heard, why then
I'll never, never thunder again!"
And a little girl once kept so still
That she heard a fly on the window sill
Whisper and say to a ladybird--
"She's the stillest child I ever heard!"
To Make a Prairie
(Emily Dickinson)
To make a prairie it takes clover and one bee;
One clover and a bee,
And reverie
The reverie alone will do
If bees are few.
Real Silence
(Peter Minard)
Not merely an absence of noise,
Real Silence begins when a reasonable being
withdraws from the noise in order to find
peace and order in his inner sanctuary.
Songs about Silence
- Bound to Silence - Paul Evans (1968)
- Breaking Silence - Janis Ian (1993)
- Circle of Silence - Henry Paul Band (1982)
- Crystal Silence - Charlie Byrd (1973)
- Deafening Roar of Silence - Pat Boone (1968)
- Enjoy the Silence - Pat MacDonald (2003)
- Listen to the Silence - Bruce Hornsby (1998)
- Moment of Silence - Judy Lynn (1965)
- My Silent Love - Charles Brown (1954)
- Out of the Silence Came a Song - Porter Wagoner (1967)
- Silence Ain't Golden Anymore - Gregg Allman (1977)
- Silence and Pain - IIIrd Tyme Out (1994)
- Silence is Golden - The Tremeloes (1967)
- Silence is so Loud, The - Dave Kirby (1973)
- Silence Makes a Lonesome Sound - James House (1995)
- Silence on the Line - Henson Cargill (1980)
- Silence or Tears - The Country Gentlemen (1974)
- Silence Says it All - Martin Delray (1990)
- Silence Speaks for Itself, The - Clay Walker (1993)
- Silent Highway - Bland Simpson (2003)
- Silent Little Clues - Lauren Hunt (2006)
- Silent Love - Russ Taff (1985)
- Silent Night (After the Fight) - Ronnie Milsap (1981)
- Silent Running On Dangerous Ground - The Mechanics (1985)
- Silent Sunlight - Cat Stevens (1973)
- Silent Tears and Roses - Herb Alpert (1992)
- Silent Treatment - Earl Thomas Conley (1980)
- Sound of Silence, The - Simon and Garfunkel (1966)
Songs about Shh
- Shh - Terri Lyne Carrington (1988)
- Shh, Don't Talk - Goofy and Hawkeye (1999)
- Shh, I'm Watching the Movie - The Shirelles (1965)
- Shh, I'm Working - Lorenzo Gallini (2008)
- Shh, it's a Secret - Eben Brooks (2006)
- Shh, Quiet - Anne Dueholm (2001)
Songs about Quiet
- As Quiet as it's Kept - Billy Guy (1963)
- Be Quiet, Mind - Anthony Armstrong Jones (1968)
- Deep and Quiet Love - Eddie Kendricks (1974)
- In the Quiet Morning - Joan Baez (1972)
- In the Quiet of the Dawn - The 5 Red Caps (1945)
- Living in Quiet Desperation - Sara Hickman (2006)
- Queen of the Quiet Stars - Andy Williams (1965)
- Quiet and Blue - Lenny Breau (1985)
- Quiet as it's Kept - Thurston Harris (1963)
- Quiet Boy, A - Jimmy 'the Whiz' Wisner (1960)
- Quiet Girl, A - The Dave Brubeck Quartet (1960)
- Quiet Hills - Laurie Lewis (2004)
- Quiet Look, The - Thomas Wayne (1962)
- Quiet Mind, A - Blue October (2003)
- Quiet Nights - Keter Betts (1999)
- Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars - Tommy Leonetti (1966)
- Quiet Path - Paul Baker (2007)
- Quiet Place, A - Garnet Mimms (1964)
- Quiet Storm - Betty Wright (1989)
- Quiet Village - Martin Denny (1959)
- Quietly Crazy - Ed Bruce (1986)
- Quietly Losing My Mind - Jerry Lane (1968)
- Quietly with Tact - Arthur Brown (1975)
- Shh, Quiet - Anne Dueholm (2001)
- Some Quiet Place - Brenda Holloway (1972)
- Unprecedented Quiet - Rory Block (2005)
Songs about Hush
- Honey, Hush - Big Joe Turner (1953)
- Hush - Deep Purple (1968)
- Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte - Patti Page (1965)
- Hush, Little Baby - The Weavers (1951)
- Hush Money - Jerry Riopelle (1994)
- Hushabye - The Mystics (1959)
- In the Hush of the Night - Larry Henley (1968)
- There's a Kind of Hush All Over the World - The Carpenters (1976)