May Sarton Quotes

For the self-development of men and women it is absolutely necessary that they should be alone with themselves at least one hour each day-to get the blessings of solitude.

Turning 30 was really big for me. I can get really stuck on 'I don't like this or that about myself.' I've found that the only thing that breaks that for me is being able to spend time alone, going to the movies by myself or going to art museums alone. I do that a lot. I've discovered the importance of even 15 or 30 minutes a day where it is just me.

It is a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.

The kind of solitude that refreshes and restores is very important, not just for children, not just for adolescents, but for all of us. If you don't teach your children how to be alone they will only be able to be lonely.

So it is necessary that we should learn to be alone.

Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone. To be able to listen to oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.

Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition.

I mean, I can't say that I've had many deep thoughts because I traveled alone, but it's good to be with myself in the quiet.

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

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Being alone & actually sitting with our own thoughts can lead to such growth and realizations that are rare in our everyday busy lives.

We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly - spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order.

I think alone time is good to know how to be alone with your own thoughts. I think it just helps you kind of be a better, more grounded person.

I use solitude as a judge and as a person - a lot.

Travelling alone was like laundry for my thoughts.

For a long time, I was afraid to be alone. I had to learn how to be alone. And there are still times when I think, Uh-oh! I gotta talk to somebody here or I'm gonna go crazy! But I like to be alone. Now I do. I really do. There's a big luxury in solitude.

I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me.

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.

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.

You really get caught up in this system of the world - the Instagram world, society - we really get caught up in what our friends want and what our jobs want. I think the priority in life is to feel secure and safe and solid, truly. Just feeling good, just being okay with sitting alone. I think that's a big thing people need to realize and get used to that it's okay to be alone. It's good to be alone, and you need to be able to sit by yourself and just be peaceful and silent, and learn to read a book again; learn to just be. It's hard to be when you are so used to static input.

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

I've never just been able to be alone, and I'm obsessed with being alone and hearing my thoughts. I'm trying to take this alone time — the five minutes I do have a day — to learn as much as I can.

Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.

Our age is so gregarious that there is at present a marked prejudice against anyone being alone. It is looked down on, and a need to be alone is almost considered a fault, a weakness, as though if one cannot endure - more - enjoy being with other people every minute one is aloof, unreal, and somehow to be pitied.