Top 100 Quotes On Silence And Solitude
#1. All human beings go through a previous life ... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?
Honore De Balzac
#2. When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape.
John O'Donohue
#3. Wilderness has been characterized as barren and unproductive; little can be grown in its sand and rock. But the crops of wilderness have always been its spiritual values - silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude - able to be harvested by any traveler who visits.
David Douglas
#4. Silence and solitude are confrontational. They plunge us instantly into the truth.
Barbara De Angelis
#5. Silence and solitude are more distracting to me than chatter and commotion.
Marilu Henner
#6. I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.
Zane Grey
#7. Cave is a good word ... The memory of a cave I used to know was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its fleeting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations ...
Mark Twain
#8. The best lessons of life are learnt in silence and solitude.
Abhijit Naskar
#9. Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
Thomas Merton
#10. And to think, there are still places in the world where man has not been, where he has left no footprints, where the mysteries stand secure, untouched by human eyes. I want to go to these places, the quiet, timeless, ageless places, and sit, letting silence and solitude be my teachers.
Evan Tanner
#11. A person who finds silence and solitude boring is a person who is himself boring, empty of anything worth consideration.
Ted Dekker
#12. The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee,
And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were Vacancy?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#13. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.
Mark Rothko
#14. The ancient spiritual tradition is that God gives himself fully to us in silence and solitude.
Brennan Manning
#15. The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude.
Wendell Phillips
#16. It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
H.P. Lovecraft
#18. I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.
Susanna Clarke
#20. The ideal man is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert.
Swami Vivekananda
#21. They ask only one question: "what is pleasing to the Spirit of God?" And as soon as they have heard the sound of the Spirit in the silence and solitude of their hearts, they follow its promptings even if it upsets their friends, disrupts their environment, and confuses their admirers.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#22. Just as the body takes time to recover from an infection that has afflicted it, so the soul needs times of silence and solitude for its recovery from the insane pace of modern life.
Howard Baker
#23. I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.
M. Ageyev
#24. I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.
Mark Rothko
#25. To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness.
John Muir
#26. Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.
Thomas Merton
#27. What did I fear, and why? - I, to whom the night had been
a more familiar face
than that of man
I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!
Ambrose Bierce
#28. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
Henry Miller
#29. We must understand the connection between inner solitude and inner silence; they are inseparable. All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.
Richard J. Foster
#30. Silence leads us back to our purpose, and it ignites creativity and vision.
Angela Lynne Craig
#31. The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#32. How great are the advantages of solitude! How sublime is the silence of nature's ever-active energies! There is something in the very name of wilderness, which charms the ear, and soothes the spirit of man. There is religion in it.
Estwick Evans
#33. There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger.
Linda Hogan
#34. There is nothing as certain as silence, stillness, and solitude to introduce you to the secrets of yourself.
Guy Finley
#35. Come into the silence of solitude, and the vibration there will talk to you through the voice of God.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#36. Red like blood White like bone Red like solitude White like silence Red like the beastly instinct White like a god's heart Red like thawing hatred White like a frozen, pained cry Red like the night's hungry shadows Like a sigh piercing the moon it shines white and shatters red
Tite Kubo
#37. Karamakate says, "to become a warrior, every Cohiuano man must leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams. In that journey, he has to discover, in solitude and silence, who he really is."
Tom Cole
#38. To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.
Deepak Chopra
#39. In wilderness people can find the silence and the solitude and the noncivilized surroundings that can connect them once again to their evolutionary heritage, and through an experience of the eternal mystery, can give them a sense of the sacredness of all creation.
Sigurd F. Olson
#40. Go slow, my life, go slow. Let me enjoy the beauty of silence, serenity, and solitude.
Debasish Mridha
#41. When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.
Gail Honeyman
#42. Silence is a very concrete, practical, and useful discipline in all our ministerial tasks. It can be seen as a portable cell taken with us from the solitary place into the midst of our ministry. Silence is solitude practiced in action.
Henri Nouwen
#43. The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.
Washington Irving
#44. A pine tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.
It dreameth of a Palm tree
Which far in the East alone,
In the mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.
Heinrich Heine
#45. And, in the warm silence, in the peaceful solitude of the study, Clotilde smiled down at the baby who was still sucking - his little arm in the air, pointing upwards, a symbol of hope and life.
Emile Zola
#46. There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
Herbert Marcuse
#47. Seek silence in the midst of the tumult, seek solitude in the masses, light in the midst of darkness; find forgetfulness in injury, victory in the midst of despondence, and courage in the midst of alarm, resistance in the midst of temptation, peace in the midst of war.
Michael Molinos
#48. Four billion people on this earth
but my imagination is still the same.
It's bad with large numbers.
It's still taken by particularity.
It flits in the dark like a flashlight,
illuminating only random faces
while all the rest go by,
never coming to mind and never really missed.
Wislawa Szymborska
#49. In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be;
Where all the noises, that on peace intrude,
Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee,
Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.
John Clare
#50. He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
James Salter
#51. The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#52. Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.
Haruki Murakami
#53. What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?
Kathy Acker
#54. I arise to day ... In the name of Silence / Womb of the Word, / In the name of Stillness / Home of Belonging, / In the name of the Solitude / of the Soul and the Earth
John O'Donohue
#55. See, once you have begun to experience solitude and silence, you discover that you actually have a soul and that there is a God.Then you can begin to practice Sabbath and that will enable you to re-enter community.You can't have community without Sabbath.
Dallas Willard
#56. ...there is something which impresses the mind with awe in the shade and silence of these vast forests. In the deep solitude, alone with nature, we converse with God.
Thaddeus Mason Harris
#57. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Thomas Merton
#58. I like peace and solitude and silence.
Carla Bruni
#59. And we had met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude.
George MacDonald
#60. The cure for too much to do is solitude and silence.
Ken Blanchard
#61. For the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude, walks on the Heath, the time to think while others ... well, often fall apart. Not so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present at this season.
Will Self
#62. Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
#63. Periods of silent solitude spent in introspective reflecting are sacred and a source of great strength and comfort. We can learn from listening to the rhythms of nature and from appreciating the eternal hush of the cosmos.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#64. When words don't come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing." ~ Strider Marcus Jones, Poet
Strider Marcus Jones
#65. Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the light-hearted and loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit awhile in his unobtrusive company, practicing for solitude, sobering their minds in the man's rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#66. It takes solitude under the stars, for us to be reminded of our eternal origin and our far destiny.
Archibald Rutledge
#67. The food doesn't matter. No, up here, in the room. It's so wonderful to shut out the world for a few hours. Rest, peace, silence, solitude. You would think they were luxuries that only the very rich can afford, and yet they cost nothing. Strange that they should be so hard to come by.
W. Somerset Maugham
#68. Solitude can be very rewarding and full of blessing because in the silence of the inner being, one finds God
Fulton J. Sheen
#69. I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
Karen Armstrong
#70. It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
Thomas Merton
#71. It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before.
Nick Hornby
#72. When your eyes meet my solitude
Silence ripens, a fruit,
And sleep turns into storm.
Forbidden doors fling open
And water learns to suffer.
Joumana Haddad
#73. Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.
Coleman Barks
#74. Her spirits wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give.
Jane Austen
#75. Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
Sigmund Freud
#76. However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.
Michael Foley
#77. First and foremost, the monk should own nothing in this world, but he should have as his possessions solitude of the body, modesty of bearing, a modulated tone of voice, and a well-ordered manner of speech. He should be without anxiety as to his food and drink, and should eat in silence.
Saint Basil
#78. You grow your best thoughts in silence, solitude, and meditation. When you relax and think deeply, you are giving your inmost powers their best opportunity to disclose themselves.
Grenville Kleiser
#79. If I'm going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I've got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don't turn on music or the TV unless I really need to.
Richard Rohr
#80. Solitude is an unmarked place beyond the borders of the map, a place where most fear to tread. It's no surprise, then, that this is where the greatest secrets and most valuable treasures are hidden.
Cristen Rodgers
#81. We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
C.S. Lewis
#82. We can't imagine deserts without camel caravans and we can't imagine wisdom without the teachings of solitude and silence!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#83. I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.
John Fowles
#84. Eventually we find that we no longer need silence. We no longer need solitude. We no longer even need words. We can make all our actions holy. We can cook a meal for our family and it becomes prayer. We can go for a walk in the park and it becomes prayer.
Mark Haddon
#85. Find a secret place and be unreachable! And then, in the silence of solitude, the things you cannot reach in the crowds will meet you there!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#86. Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.
Brennan Manning
#87. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
Virginia Woolf
#88. Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of.
Samuel Beckett
#89. In a revealed religion, silence with God has a value in itself and for its own sake, just because God is God. Failure to recognize the value of mere being with God, as the beloved, without doing anything, is to gouge the heart out of Christianity."10 Silent solitude makes true speech possible
Brennan Manning
#90. Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And fled to the silence of sweet solitude.
John Clare
#91. Solitude, at first is scary. All you have is yourself. After a while its comforting, it knows the real you and cant judge you for it. If you live it long enough it becomes an addiction, like all things, too much of it and you will go insane but not enough of it will also send you there.n
Nikki Rowe
#92. Some people can't stand being alone. I love solitude and silence. But when I come out of it, I'm a regular talking machine. It's all or nothing for me.
Celine Dion
#93. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#94. space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#95. I tend to avoid people who always have something to say ... and those who expect me to always have something to say.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#96. Our religious activities should be ordered in such a way as to have plenty of time for the cultivation of the fruits of solitude and silence.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#97. Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.
Rebecca Solnit
#98. I need to be alone. After a full day of talking, smiling, listening, showing, nodding, translating, I want to be alone. I want simply to come home, close the door, and sit in silence, gathering up the bits of myself that have come loose. I want to think, or not think. I want to rest.
Jamie Zeppa
#99. You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#100. Solitude is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it.
Deepak Chopra
