The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle. - Samuel Johnson
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything. - Willa Cather
Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends – sorry, I meant characters. - Carla H. Krueger
Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. - Peter Straub
and children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value. - Rainer Maria Rilke
If you are idle, be not solitary. If you are solitary, be not idle. - Samuel Johnson
Each man is his own prisoner, in solitary confinement for life.
It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. - bell hooks
Writing is a solitary occupation. - Bernard Cornwell
... you know my belief in bald-headed Fortune, with the one solitary hair. Well, I meant to grab that hair... - Emmuska Orczy
It's important that someone celebrate our existence... People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture. - Lois McMaster Bujold
She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components. - Jhumpa Lahiri
The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable. - Karl Kraus
If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you. - Martha Beck
I left Beijing because I wanted to be alone and to forge my own path, but I know now that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people's beginnings and ends. - Ma Jian
Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. - Ernest Dimnet
...Nobody ever gets to know no body! We're all of us sentenced to a solitary confinement inside our own skins for life!
At one point in your life you have to decide whether you want to become a sachem or a solitary. - Akilnathan Logeswaran
No one can sum up all God is able to accomplish through one solitary life, wholly yielded, adjusted, and obedient to Him. - D.L. Moody
So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment. - Jane Smiley
The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own. - David Brooks
No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers. - Laurie Colwin
And yet this self, containsTides, continents and stars―a myriad selves,Is small and solitary as one grass-bladePassed over by the windAmongst a myriad grasses on the prairie. - Cecil Day-Lewis
Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom. - Arthur Koestler
How could someone possibly be that beautiful? She wondered for the hundred thousandth time. What higher power orchestrated such a perfect union of genes? Who decided that one single solitary soul deserved skin like that? It was so fundamentally unfair.(Chasing Harry Winston) - Lauren Weisberger
You will never feel alone, if you run down the stairs of loneliness; as every solitary step becomes your companion. - Munia Khan
There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world. - Arthur Conan Doyle
I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing--and reading--is a solitary business. And it’s good to know I’m not alone. - Shannon Celebi
The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. - Thomas Hobbes
Writing is a solitary business. It’s just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill. - Shannon Celebi
We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. - Rainer Maria Rilke
I sailed up to the cold stars but they were cold no longer, and I grew bigger and bigger until I was the stars and they were me, and I was Union, and for a single solitary glittering instant I was the universe. - George R.R. Martin
Writing begins as a solitary obsession and ends up as communication. - Marty Rubin
I was the solitary plovera pencil for a wing-boneFrom the secret notesI must tiltupon the pressureexecute and adjust In us sea-air rhythm"We live by the urgent waveof the verse - Lorine Niedecker
I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is? - Sylvia Plath
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. - Franz Kafka
And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?"If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists. - Donna Tartt
I've never had inner turmoil about all this. You find a lot of people these days who cannot stand to be alone. You could lock me up in solitary for weeks on end, and I'd keep myself amused. - Keith Richards
You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. - Franz Kafka
Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there. - Meister Eckhart
We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict. - Jim Morrison
All I know is I'm totallyalone. All alone i n an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don't know, and I give up thinking about it. - Haruki Murakami
Living without personal boundaries is like trying to hold my breath and gasp for air, at the same time, it doesn't work. My introverted nature requires solitary sanctuary, to breathe. My internal batteries need time to recharge if i am to give from a place of abundance. - Jaeda DeWalt
The acts of observing and judging are necessarily solitary acts. - Mike Klepper
To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven. - Richelle E. Goodrich
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. - Tennessee Williams
To wander solitary there:Two paradises ‘twere in oneTo live in paradise alone. - Andrew Marvell
This is the wonder of Christmas, that in the solitary form of an impoverished infant God has handed me everything that I could never create so that I can be everything that I could never be. - Craig D. Lounsbrough
We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us. - Storm Jameson
I’ve come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power. - Jason Mraz
Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify. - Sara Sheridan
Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death. - Octavio Paz