Every means has proved powerless, every path too short. God’s impenetrable night wraps round us. Terrible loneliness accompanies us, but this is necessary and inevitable. Every word of consolation seems like a lie. One believes one has been abandoned by God.
Letters from the Desert
by Carlo Carretto
Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
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Clinging is a product of a scarcity mindset. It’s a belief that joy is limited, that there’s very little of it to go around, and that you never know when, or if, you’ll get more of it. Savoring, on the other hand, is the manifestation of an abundance mindset. Savoring acknowledges that joy is fleeting, but seeks to capture as much of it as possible, while trusting that joy will come back again.
ARE YOU CLINGING OR SAVORING?
by Ingrid Fetell Lee -
If you are constantly canceling plans with your friends, not following through, neglecting to answer messages for days and weeks on end, ignoring invitations, and not showing up for people at very important moments in their lives — that’s not introversion, that’s isolation.
The Difference Between Being an Introvert and Isolating Yourself
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The food barely filled me. I could have eaten forever, and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.
Jami Attenburg, Protective Measures [from the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone]
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I had no specific place to go, so I just kept walking, and looking. It was while walking the streets of that same city that the philosopher Walter Benjamin arrived at the conclusion: ‘Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.’ Perhaps it isn’t that urban spaces, when empty, create a feeling of palpable absence, but rather, when they are empty, we can confront the feelings of abandonment and loneliness that thrum below the surfaces.
Struth’s unpeopled photos evoke the loneliness of urban life
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The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “see the folks,” and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day’s solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues”; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau -
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau
SO GOOD QUOTES 