“There are some people utterly heartless and devoid of feeling, yet they can’t leave others alone in their misery, but interfere because they’re afraid of those others being able to get on without them. Nothing is sacred to them, they’re so self-important.”
—Anton Chekhov
Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
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I felt that my whole life was bound to go on in the same solitude and helpless dreariness, from which I myself had no strength and even no wish to escape.
—Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness -
We have become so used to this state of anesthesia that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us. When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch, or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves, we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game that makes us believe that everything is fine after all.
—Henri Nouwen -
The former fact also explains the restlessness of those who have nothing to do, and their aimless travelling. What drives them from country to country is the same boredom which at home drives them together into such crowds and heaps it is funny to see.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Classics)
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For my part, without loved ones, it seemed to me that I was accepting the idea of death more and more easily; of course I would have liked to be happy, to be part of a happy community–all humans want that–but, well, it was really out of the question at this stage.
Serotonin: A Novel
Michel Houellebecq -
“I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”
—Charles Bukowski -
We must not seek to know God, or anything else from or about God. We must rather humble ourselves. God will then come to us and give us that which we desire. If you don’t humbly acknowledge your spiritual poverty, you won’t be able to ask God to give you the treasures of His grace. But through humility and prayer, God pours out the riches of His knowledge, granting us communion in His life. But rather than being filled with knowledge of God, we normally live with a void at the center of our existence. There is a hole in our heart, into which crawl all the cares and worries of life. We work ourselves to exhaustion in pursuit of success and happiness. We struggle to improve our position in society, to attend the right schools, and move in the right kind of circles. But the void within us is always on the increase. Nothing in the world can fill it, because it can only be filled with God. But we mustn’t despair, because despair itself is a sign of pride, and thus will take us even further away from the humble God. Avoid that road. Resist temptation, struggle, take up your cross, and God will come and find you, wherever you are.
—Elder Aimilanos of Simonopetra -
We have seen that creative people are used to solitude, and we have explored some of the reasons for this. Instead of seeking friends in whom to confide, or counsellors to whom to tell their troubles, they use their gifts to come to terms with, and to make sense of, their sufferings. Once a work is completed, it can be shared with others; but the initial response to depression is to turn inward rather than outward.
Solitude, a Return to the Self
Anthony Storr
SO GOOD QUOTES 