Tao Te Ching
Aloneness / Solitude
Chögyam Trungpa used to describe how we create so much unnecessary trouble and suffering for ourselves because we don’t want what’s good for us and are so attracted by what’s bad for us. One of the best examples of this may be how much we’re afraid of being along and how much we will sacrifice on the alter of superficial entertainment, conversations, friends and empty goals. Instead, by leaning into solitude, we could discover what Rumi meant when he said, “To be alone with the truth for just a moment, is worth more than the world and life itself.”
Quotes (82)
“Asked how he could endure such a solitary life, the philosopher answered, ‘I was in very good company until you came in.’”
“To fear a crowd, and yet to fear solitude, to fear to go unguarded, to fear the very guards themselves; to be unwilling to dispense with an armed escort, and yet to feel displeasure at the sight of one's attendants carrying arms: what a hateful predicament.”
“The wise become their own best friend and appreciate privacy while the man of no virtue or ability—afraid of solitude—turns into his own worst enemy”
“He does not struggle to make money and does not make a virtue of poverty. He goes his way without relying on others and does not pride himself on walking alone.”
“We are born alone and die alone; experience the good and bad consequences of our karma alone; and we go alone to hell or the supreme abode”
“Alas! all joy has vanished from my life,
Alone beside the hill.
Never to follow fashion will I stoop,
Then must live lonely still.”
“When you have shut your doors and darkened your room, remember, never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone; your genius is within.”
“Only in silent serenity is the self known, full spirited in its own glory, no stranger to sages and not diminished with worldly people.” 
“The Great Way has no gate; there are 1000 paths to it. If you pass through the barrier, you walk the universe alone.”
“This aloneness is worth more than a thousand lives.
This freedom is worth more than all the lands on earth.
To be alone with the truth for just a moment,
Is worth more than the world and life itself.”
“If you are alone, you are all your own; with a companion you are half yourself.”
“I am always alone and speak to no one... I have no friend of any kind and I do not want any.”
“From his youth, Michelangelo had consecrated himself not only to sculpture and painting, but to all the other arts with such devouring energy that he had to separate himself almost entirely from the society of men… it was his love of work alone which made him solitary for he was filled with the joy and rapture which hiss work gave him and the society of men only bored him… he was never less lonely than when he was alone.”
“From his youth, Michelangelo had consecrated himself not only to sculpture and painting, but to all the other arts with such devouring energy that he had to separate himself almost entirely from the society of men… it was his love of work alone which made him solitary for he was filled with the joy and rapture which hiss work gave him and the society of men only bored him… he was never less lonely than when he was alone.”
“Nature has presented us with a large faculty of entertaining ourselves alone: and often calls us to it, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but chiefly and mostly to ourselves.”
“He than can live alone resembles the brute beast in nothing, the sage in much, and like a god in everything.”
“All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
“Superior and alone, Confucius stood
Who taught that useful science,—to be good.”
“Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character best formed in the stormy billows of the world.”
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
“To fly from need not be to hate mankind. All are not fit with them to stir and toil. Nor is it discontent to keep the mind deep in its fountain.”
“in solitude, where every one is thrown upon his own resources, what a man has in himself comes to light... a man is sociable just in the degree in which he is intellectually poor and generally vulgar.”
“The human need for socialization drives human porcupines together [‘Schopenhauer’s or The Porcupine’s dilemma’] only to be mutually repelled by the many irritating qualities of the others (‘familiarity breeds contempt’). Codes of politeness and manners create a tolerable but unsatisfying balance between social warmth and irritation so the more independent and self-sufficient prefer more solitude.”
“'Tis solitude should teach us how to die; it hat no flatters; vanity can give no hollow aid; alone—man with his God must strive.”
“The more active the imagination, the fewer perceptions from outside transmitted to us by the senses. Long periods of silence and solitude nurture it, journeys, the bustle of life, and high noons of stimulation chase it far away.”
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams… In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
“When he realizes that he is responsible to all men for all and for everything, for all human sins, communal and individual, only then will the purpose of a monk’s solitude be realized”
“Everywhere these days, we have ceased to understand that we only find true security in social solidarity, not in isolated individual effort.”
“How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn't care about careers,
And exigencies never fears.”
“I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions... If he Renoir knew I was about to go, Renoir would doubtless want to join me and that would be equally disastrous for both of us.”
“Voluntary loneliness—isolation from others—is the readiest safeguard against the unhappiness that may arise out of human relations.”
“A man alone is only half a man—it takes both a man and a woman to complete the circuit... sublime thoughts and great deeds are the children of married minds.”
“You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.”
“Demosthenes, a leader such as Greece had never known before and was never to know again. History, indeed, has known few of them... What he did all alone was almost miraculous... he lifted the whole political mess which Plato had turned from as hopeless, out of the corruption in which it was sunk up to a lofty level of patriotism.”
“Nature has a language of its own read by those who have lived long in solitude as their own unconscious inner feelings and mysterious foreknowledge.”
“The practice of solitude engenders the love of solitude. Like anything important that we at first fear because we know it to be incompatible with lesser things we're attached to—pleasures which cease to please as soon as we have known solitude.”
“By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest... The mystic becomes one with God, and feels himself absolved from duty to his neighbor.”
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry.”
“We are solitary. We many delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. that is all.”
“today as then—because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not want to know—I am a solitary”
“Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”
“Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.”
“When shall I at last retire into solitude alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream?”
“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”
“The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of man to all that is hidden to others.”
“I belonged to no party, no organization, no group, society, or faction.”
“Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Solovyov or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth.”
“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.”
“I love people. I love my family, my children … but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.”
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
“As soon as you're alone, things lay hold of you by themselves and always force you to take the roads that are hardest to climb. And even if you don't get there, what fine views you have, and how reassuring everything is.”
“I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries.”
“I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries.”
“Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?”
“Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.”
“You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
“Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.”
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
“I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.”
“Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting—are achieved by men who are supremely alone.”
“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”
“Losing consciousness in digital dreams
Ignoring life caught up in schemes
Time to come on back home
And start being alone.”
“A cell phone isn't a toy. It's a very lucky technical miracle for all of us. It's a prime weapon against our essential loneliness but I can't say I've ever felt that lonely.”
“You don't have to know how to do it... There is no help coming from anywhere at all. You have to make your own individual journey that is purely based on you.”
“If we stop making ingratiating gestures to please the world and just centralize in what is, we begin to see that being alone is a very beautiful thing.”
“When trying to accomplish something serious, I liked to do it myself. Having to check things out with other people and get them to understand seemed to me a great waste of time and energy when it was a lot easier to work along in silence.”
“loneliness is the default state of the world. Friends, family, love or a band are the rare anomalies... You're born alone, you die alone, and for most of what lies between, you are alone.”
“the so-called normalcy of hamster-wheel activity keeps people running away from themselves. Isolated, but too scared to be alone.”
“Waging war takes guts, but you have the comfort of knowing that your friends stand beside you. Fighting for peace takes even greater courage, because all too often, you stand alone.”
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