Capacity To Be Alone Quotes

Remember, if you cannot live with yourself, you cannot live with anyone else. The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. ~ Osho

The ability to reflect is associated with critical thinking and reasoning ability. And the capacity to be alone is one of the highest levels of development. It's important to know how to self-soothe and be confident of other people's love even when they're not there in front of you. ~ Laurie Helgoe

Child's creativity – indeed, the human faculty of imagination – presupposes a capacity to be alone, which itself can arise only out of basic confidence in the care of a loved one. ~ Axel Honneth

The capacity to form attachments on equal terms is considered evidence of emotional maturity. It is the absence of this capacity which is pathological. Whether there may be other criteria of emotional maturity, like the capacity to be alone, is seldom taken into account. ~ Anthony Storr

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person
without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other. ~ Osho

I enjoy fame except when I'm with my daughter. Kids stop me all the time and I don't want her to be jealous of the attention. Also, sometimes I just want to be left alone and I refuse to make rubber faces. That's when they start asking, What's the matter, man, don't you like your job? I say, Yeah, I like my job. But I also like having sex, and I'm not going to do that in front of you either. ~ Jim Carrey

My instinct, of course, is to imagine us as one of many planets racing its evolution against its sun--merely one in the galactic Darwinian pursuit. But maybe we're not. Maybe all this talk of the inevitability of aliens is garbage and we're miraculously, beautifully alone in our biological success. What if we're winning? What if we're actually the most evolved intelligence in all this big bang chaos? What if other planets have bacteria and single-celled genotypes but nothing more?

The precedent is all the more pressing. Humans alone could be winning the race against our giant gas time bomb and running with the universal Olympic torch. What an honor. What a responsibility. What a gift we have been given to be born in an atmosphere with oxygen and carbon dioxide and millions of years and phenotypes cheering us on with recycles of energy.

The thing is, I think we can make it. I think we can shove ourselves into spaceships before things get too cold.

I only hope we don't fuck things up before that. Because millions of years is a long time and I don't want to let the universe down. ~ Marina Keegan

They that have beauty, let them be thankful for it, and make a good use of it, let them console themselves, and do the best they can without it: certainly, though liable to be over-estimated, it is a gift of God, and not to be despised. Many will feel this who have felt that they could love, and whose hearts tell them that they are worthy to be loved again; while yet they are debarred, by the lack of this or some such seeming trifle, from giving and receiving that happiness they seem almost made to feel and to impart. As well might the humble glowworm despise that power of giving light without which the roving fly might pass her and repass her a thousand times, and never rest beside her: she might hear her winged darling buzzing over and around her; he vainly seeking her, she longing to be found, but with no power to make her presence known, no voice to call him, no wings to follow his flight;
the fly must seek another mate, the worm must live and die alone. ~ Anne Bronte

Can writing ever be taught? The best answer to that was given obliquely by the rock musician David Lee Roth. When asked if money could buy happiness he said, no, but with money you could buy the big boat and go right up to where the people were happy. With a teacher you can go right up to where the writing is done; the leap is made alone with vision, subject, passion, and instinct. So a writer comes to the page with vision in her heart and craft in her hands and a sense of what a story might be in her head. How do the three come together? My thesis is the old one: they merge in the physical writing - inside the act of writing, not from the outside. The process is the teacher. ~ Ron Carlson

Every time a child organizes and completes a chore, spends some time alone without feeling lonely, loses herself in play for an hour, or refuses to go along with her peers in some activity she feels is wrong, she will be building meaning and a sense of worth for herself and harmony in her family. ~ Barbara Coloroso

I want to be strong."
"You are strong."
"Not really."
Judd exhaled softly. "No, I guess not, but you're stronger than you think. You're stronger than when we met. Hell, you told me no and we both know that couldn't have been easy."
Giving him a little grin, I shrugged again. "Wasn't that hard either."
"Liar."
Grinning wider, I sighed. "I really wanted you."
Judd's smile faded. "I know. I wanted you too."
"That time has passed."
"No. We still want it. That's why you look at me like I'm both your salvation and a death sentence. You still want me and I clearly still want you."
"You walked away."
"I wanted you to do well on your own."
"Then let me."
"Now, I want you to do well on your own with me standing nearby. Also with me frequently inside you."
"Don't be nasty."
"It wouldn't be. Somehow, it'd be better than anything I've known."
Even as my skin flushed at the thought of us alone and naked, I shrugged with disinterest. "That's the Arby's thing talking."
"Stop with the Arby's shit, will you? You're a beautiful chick and I can't get you out of my head. Comparing you to a fucking shit eatery isn't acceptable. It's like comparing the Sistine Chapel to my auntie's house. Ain't even close. ~ Bijou Hunter

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began.

In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years.

I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional. ~ Jeanine Cummins

Not everyone knows how to be alone with others, how to share solitude. We have to help each other to understand how to be in our solitude, so that we can relate to each other without grabbing on to each other. We can be interdependent but not dependent. Loneliness is rejected despondency. Solitude is shared interdependence. ~ David Spangler

For a split second I wonder what I am doing here on this battlefield, on the front line. I am a princess. I am soft and regal. I am quiet, forgotten Sorrowlynn, who never leaves her rooms. And yet I am so much more. I have the capacity to be anything. To be everything! This girl running to fight for the greater good is me. For the first time ever, I feel like I am living the life I was meant to be living all along. ~ Bethany Wiggins

Leave your brother alone, baby girl. He's going adventuring. Lucky bastard." His dad dragged him into a bear proportioned hug. "Bring me back some images of the local ladies. Naked ones if you can," he whispered. "You'd need eyes to look at those, Geoffrey," his mother retorted. While they argued about his dad's interest in the human body as art, Naomi clutched his tear soaked shirt in her fists and shook him. "Be careful." "Aren't I always?" "No. ~ Eve Langlais

Trusting as we did to the virtue of the people, the real people, not the politicians and demagogues, we passed through the most responsible and trying scenes, sustained by the bone and sinew of the nation, the laborers of the land, where alone, in these days of Bank rule, and ragocrat corruption, real virtue and love of liberty is to be found. ~ Andrew Jackson

In order to thrive as artists we need to be available to the universal flow. When we put a stopper on our capacity for joy by anorectically declining the small gifts of life, we turn aside the larger gifts as well. ~ Julia Cameron

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps. ~ Ann Patchett

To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality. ~ Indira Gandhi

...a being, with a capacity of reasoning, would not have failed to discover, as his faculties unfolded, that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals; and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms, but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

And you're right. You are on your own. We all are, and we all have to learn it sooner or later. If you have to be alone, though, wouldn't you rather be alone among friends? ~ Danielle Paige

I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…

The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.

The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: 'Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on. ~ Edward Thomas

The realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts, but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life. ~ Sam Harris

How do you think I'd look on one of these temples?"
Etta laughed. "How would I look?"
"I couldn't bare the thought of even your face here, left alone, for only the jungle to admire." He shook his head. "Never. I'd never allow it. The only thing is to hire an artist to turn you into a figurehead for a ship, so some part of you will always be venturing out to sea where you belong. ~ Alexandra Bracken

The physiological effects of hunger alone stop us from fully engaging in the world and reaching our full potential. Our bodies and brains just don't function properly when they're deprived of nourishment. And since diet culture has been aimed primarily at women for the past 100 years, hunger could be seen as one of the most effective tools for suppressing female advancement. It keeps us thinking about things like waistlines and sugar substitutes rather than the need for social, political, and economic equality. Which is what led Wolf to famously write, "Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history." In other words, we cannot take on the world while we're hungry. ~ Megan Jayne Crabbe

( ... ) But Gaia had absorbed the new information. "I won't need to kill billions, Diana. When Nemesis is gone, there will be no other like me. Just me alone. I will grow and spread, one body and then another, and soon there will be so many of me that it will be impossible to eradicate me. Eventually all will be me, and I will be all."
"Won't that be boring?" Diana asked. "You'd be dating yourself. You'll have no one to discuss your evil plans with. ( ... ) ~ Michael Grant

On Women:

"What do you mean?" Martin asked curiously, passing him a glass. "Here, down this and be good."

"Because–" Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled appreciation of it. "Because of the women. They will worry you until you die, as they have already worried you, or else I was born yesterday. Now there's no use choking me; I'm going to have my say. This is undoubtedly your calf love; but for Beauty's sake show better taste next time. What under heaven do you want with a daughter of the bourgeoisie? Leave them alone. Pick out some great, wanton flame of a woman, who laughs at life and jeers at death and loves one while she may. There are such women, and they will love you just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois-sheltered life. ~ Jack London

The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well
to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how
and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone. ~ Wendell Berry

Love will show you that you do not have to search for it because it abides in you whole-heartedly. Love can be bittersweet but its grace is patience. Love is difficult but its mercy is tender. At times love might make you feel empty but you are never alone. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

She who ever had remained in the depth of my being, in the twilight of gleams and of glimpses; she who never opened her veils in the morning light, will be my last gift to thee, my God, folded in my final song.

Words have wooed yet failed to win her; persuasion has stretched to her its eager arms in vain.

I have roamed from country to country keeping her in the core of my heart, and around her have risen and fallen the growth and decay of my life.

Over my thoughts and actions, my slumbers and dreams, she reigned yet dwelled alone and apart.

many a man knocked at my door and asked for her and turned away in despair.

There was none in the world who ever saw her face to face, and she remained in her loneliness waiting for thy recognition ~ Rabindranath Tagore

If you desire to find the true spirit of Christmas and partake of the sweetness of it, let me make this suggestion to you. During the hurry of the festive occasion of this Christmas season, find time to turn your heart to God. Perhaps in the quiet hours, and in a quiet place, and on your knees - alone or with loved ones - give thanks for the good things that have come to you, and ask that His Spirit might dwell in you as you earnestly strive to serve Him and keep His commandments. He will take you by the hand and His promises will be kept. ~ Howard W. Hunter

He repeated that she had to learn to be alone. Once she'd learned that, then she would know how to live with a man without clamouring and demanding and suffering disappointments. ~ C.K. Stead

Ruin your fucking self before they do. Otherwise they'll screw you because you're a nobody. They'll keep you alive but you'll have to crawl and say "thank-you" for every bone they throw. You might as well stay drunk or shoot junk and be a crazy fucker. If the rich guys want to play with you, make them get their hands dirty. Send them away gagging, or sobbing if they're soft-hearted. You'll be left alone if you're frightening, and dead you're free! ~ Jenny Holzer

On the one hand we can't be alone, people like us; on the other we can't stand company. We can't stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it's totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Just leave me alone, I want to be alone, she said when Jack tried to open the car door. She hit the lock, and wound the window up. Since the roof was down, it was a fairly pointless exercise. ~ Sarah Mayberry

To an extent, our relationship with the movies is always subjective. Our capacity to be involved says as much about each of us; I've never fathomed why anyone would want to spend four hours in the company of the exceedingly tiresome Scarlett O'Hara. ~ Steve Erickson

I don't know if I will have the time to write any more letters, because I might be too busy trying to participate. So, if this does end up being the last letter, I just want you to know that I was in a bad place before I started high school, and you helped me. Even if you didn't know what I was talking about, or know someone who's gone through it, you made me not feel alone. Because I know there are people who say all these things don't happen. And there are people who forget what it's like to be sixteen when they turn seventeen. I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all become somebody's mom or dad. But right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening. I am here, and I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful. I can see it. This one moment when you know you're not a sad story. You are alive. And you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you're listening to that song, and that drive with the people who you love most in this world. And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite. ~ Stephen Chbosky

You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. ~ Steve Toltz

Let's banish these misleaders from among us, and when we do, we shouldn't fill their places from our Persian peerage alone. As our journey continues, we're going to be joined by many races of men. Just as we choose our horses from the best stocks, not limiting ourselves to our national breed, we should choose the best men to join us in the work of command, regardless of their country or color." A ~ Xenophon

It takes practice to stand with others facing pain of death, and it helps if you don't have to do it all alone. We should practice on the small stuff so that we will be better able to stand together for what we believe and for what we love, who may someday need our support. ~ Megan McKenna

And this pleasure, different from every other, had in the end created in him a need of her, which she alone, by her presence or by her letters, could assuage, almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse as another need which characterised this new period in Swann's life, where the sereness, the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of spiritual superabundance, without his knowing to what he owed this unlooked-for enrichment of his life, any more than a person in delicate health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery: - this other need, which, too, developed in him independently of the visible, material world, was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it. ~ Marcel Proust

Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood.

You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery. ~ Tobias Wolff

We were alone here. We had always been alone here. When we died and rid ourselves of our meaningless existences, we would die alone, our souls would abandon us for newer, better bodies and we would rot.
Eventually, probably not too far in the distant future, there would be no one left to remember us at all.
And then the world would be alone.
And maybe that was what nature had intended all along... ~ Madeline Sheehan

A good will is good not because of what it effects, or accomplishes, not because of its fitness to attain some intended end, but good just by its willing, i.e. in itself; and, considered by itself, it is to be esteemed beyond compare much higher than anything that could ever be brought about by it in favor of some inclinations, and indeed, if you will, the sum of all inclinations. Even if by some particular disfavor of fate, or by the scanty endowment of a stepmotherly nature, this will should entirely lack the capacity to carry through its purpose; if despite its greatest striving it should still accomplish nothing, and only the good will were to remain (not of course, as a mere wish, but as the summoning of all means that are within our control); then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has full worth in itself. ~ Immanuel Kant

Becoming carbon neutral is only the beginning. The climate problem will not be solved by one company reducing its emissions to zero, and it won't be solved by one government acting alone. The climate problem will not be solved without mass participation by the general public in countries around the globe. ~ Rupert Murdoch

Like most musicians, I'm good at becoming immersed in the music that I am currently working on. We seldom lift up our heads to contemplate even the music we will be doing in the future, let alone what we've done in the past. ~ Tony Levin

You don't have to be alone to feel alone. ~ Roland Smith

For a while I would have trench-times, when everything felt like blank paper, and I couldn't feel anyone's heart pointed even in my direction, let alone anyone loving me or wanting me to be around. Very boring, very lonely, very tired, again. It was hard to feel anything except "I am not one of the creatures who will experience anything precious. ~ Jenny Slate

Okay, I know--my superpower--I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know...in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again. ~ Douglas Coupland

Adam Parrish was lonesome.
There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome. One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment, but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.
Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.
Adam was not always alone, but he was always lonesome. Even in a group, he was slowly perfecting the skill of holding himself separate. It was easier than one might expect; the others allowed him to do it. He knew he was different since aligning himself more tightly with the ley line this summer. He was himself, but more powerful. Himself, but less human.
If he were them, he would silently watch him draw away, too.
It was better this way. He had not fought with anyone for so long. He had not been angry for weeks. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

To think to be wise alone is a very great folly. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

It isn't easy being a brilliant inventor, always alone. Always misunderstood. Easy to turn bitter, make horrible mistakes. People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.
-Hephaestus ~ Rick Riordan

Its taken 14 billion years for matter to gain the capacity to become conscious of itself. If this is true, it wouldn't make any sense that the whole point of enlightenment would be to escape from the whole process at the very instant that the universe is beginning to awaken to itself. ~ Andrew Cohen