Pastoral Resources

Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.

With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

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 not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.

Solitude begets whimsies.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.

Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.

The conductor's stand is not a continent of power, but rather an island of solitude.

Alone let him constantly meditate in solitude on that which is salutary for his soul, for he who meditates in solitude attains supreme bliss.

Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.

No matter how much we love our family and friends, a part of us needs the occasional moment of solitude as a plant needs water. It is the inmost core of each of us that, that part which nobody can define but which we all recognize because it never changes.

But the delights of solitude don't only consist of dreaming. Next in enjoyment, I think, comes planning.

Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.