Up: [[Hestia]] Created: 2023-10-19 Updated: 2026-01-09 > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] > Solitude is for me 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. > > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] > The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one’s own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you find that you cannot support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation. > [!orbit] Matuso Basho > The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter. > [!Orbit] Bertolt Brecht > What kind of times are these when a conversation about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many atrocities. > [!Orbit] Charlotte Bronte in *Villette* > Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings. > [!Orbit] Terry Tempest Williams > …a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of stillness, a listener of wind > [!Orbit] Wendell Berry > True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. > [!Orbit] James Carroll > There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper. > [!Orbit] May Sarton in *Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing* > Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self. > [!Orbit] Doris Grumbach in *Fifty Days of Solitude* > … the proper conditions for productive solitude are old age and the outside presence of a small portion of the beauty of the world. Given these, and the drive to explore and understand an inner territory, solitude can be an enlivening, even exhilarating experience. (p. 105) > [!Orbit] Virginia Woolf in *To the Lighthouse* > For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. 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… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. > [!Orbit] Fenton Johnson in *At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life* > To define a solitary as someone who is not married — to define solitude as the absence of coupling — is like defining silence as the absence of noise. (p. 7) > [!Orbit] Fenton Johnson in *At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life* > The great, the incomparable reward of being alone is the opportunity, if I can be large enough to rise to its occasion, of encountering at the great silence at the core of being, a silence that is at the same time uniquely mine and one with the background hum of the universe. To live for the changing of the light seems adequate reward. (p. 198) > [!Orbit] [[John O’Donohue]] in *Anam Cara: A book of Celtic wisdom* > In the neglected crevices and corners of your evaded solitude, you will find the treasure that you have alwyas sought elsewhere. (p. 136) > [!Orbit] Franz Kafka > 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. > [!Orbit] Lao Tzu > Silence is a source of great strength.