Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Travelling alone was like laundry for my thoughts.

It's kind of ridiculous that I find inspiration in just getting away from everything. But when you've gone through it, you realize that it's the enemy. It's a distraction from what you're really doing. You've got to keep moving. Like a shark.

Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.

I don't much enjoy travelling, but I have always longed to take a slow train to Russia. I'd like to go alone - like writers do - with only a pencil and piece of paper as company. I'd take my sketchbook and note down all the wonderful details of other travellers.

Writing in my closet, it's a small space but it made a lot of room in my mind.

Quiet time and solitude are vital to helping me keep perspective. I consider myself fortunate to have so much quiet built into my profession. I spend long hours by myself at my easel. And while I work, I think-of the future, of my loved ones, of God's goodness and the many exciting opportunities that surround me. I ponder the challenges I face, the needs of others, the direction my life is going.

Next to Morning Pages and Artist Dates, the most potent tool for contacting inner guidance and creativity is walking.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

You grow your best thoughts in silence, solitude, and meditation. When you relax and think deeply, you are giving your inmost powers their best opportunity to disclose themselves.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Come dress yourself in love, let the journey begin.

To travel is to take a journey into yourself.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

I mostly write on my own, walking, outside.

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

When you walk 10 hours, 11 hours a day by yourself, you are doing a walking meditation.

I think that's one of the greatest gifts you get if you're successful at something like music or film or photography - any of the arts - you can sit there and think. It's so much fun to sit there and think and wonder about the world and the universe.

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

We lived in Atlanta for a couple of years, and had a lot of fun, but my best work happens when I isolate myself. It's all about turning inward.

In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth... Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected... For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of 'eco-system' that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.

A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.