Henri Nouwen Quotes

Isolation must precede true society.

I am ready to be alone.

We've known about the transcendent power of solitude for centuries; it's only recently that we've forgotten it.

The most important habit is solitude, quiet time. People who enter their day by taking 45 minutes or an hour for themselves - meditation, prayer, inspirational reading, taking a walk - before they go for it in the real world do best.

I take much pleasure in being alone but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.

No matter how much we love our family and friends, a part of us needs the occasional moment of solitude as a plant needs water. It is the inmost core of each of us that, that part which nobody can define but which we all recognize because it never changes.

Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.

When people are with me, who can say I am alone.

May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude.

A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identifiction, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than as friends with whom we share the gifts of life.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.

The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.

People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger.

Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood.

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon." Lisa Simpson

Did he understand, as those interminable minutes ticked by, that being alone is not the same as being lonely? That being alone is a neutral state… something that exists only in the mind, not in the world, and, like a virus, is unable to survive without a willing host?

Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.

Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

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