Quotes & Sayings About Choosing To Be Alone

I knew that I was choosing the road less traveled but I'm not walking it alone. — Jason Collins

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I've never been an easy hugger. The social conventions that keep human beings separate and discrete - boundaries, etiquette, privacy, personal space - have always been a great well of safety to me. I am a rule follower. I like choosing whom I let in close. The emotional state of emergency following a death necessarily breaks those conventions down, and, unfortunately, I am bad at being human without them. I — Lindy West

Every man needs to find a peak, a mountain top or a remote island of his own choosing that he reaches under his own power alone in his own good time. — Alain Gerbault

To ensure Israel's trust in Him rather than in a human king, God gives Israel an economic system that can't support a professional army. After all, somebody has to fund the army. But not in Israel. No taxes are supposed to be collected to support a military - God wants excess money to be given to the poor, not to fund a military (e.g., Deut. 14:29). And when Israel does end up choosing a king, God does not allow him to have the financial means to support an army (Deut. 17).7 Israel's economic system, therefore, is set up so that the nation can't sustain a standing army without violating the system itself. Israel's "army" - if we can even call it an army - is a group of weekend warriors whose skills, or lack thereof, testify to the power of God, who alone ensures victory. — Preston Sprinkle

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing. — Sheena Iyengar

It wasn't simply his choosing to be alone that kept him that way; it was almost a condition of his existence. The feeling that he was an outsider had always been there. — Terry Brooks

In the beginning, being alone is always a choice. Then it's not a choice anymore. When did it stop being a choice? What is it in me that stopped choosing you, that moved into you instead so that I have to be with you in order to be with myself? — Gunnar Ardelius

You must assume full responsibility for choosing to pursue power. Know that you alone have chosen to be tested, and then proceed without doubt, remorse, or blame. You alone are responsible. — Mike Livingston

Until you get comfortable with being alone, you'll never know if you're choosing someone out of love or loneliness. — Mandy Hale

It takes no more intellectual effort than that exercised in choosing a pair of socks, or slicing a piece of cheesecake, to understand that the Dominican friar, St. Thomas Aquinas, was emphatically, hopelessly wrong. It was not goodness that spilled out into the world, shaping that which had no shape, bonum diffusivum sui, but a spectacular weave of perversion born of a simple but ultimately irresistible compulsion to explore and experience through evolving proxies that single thing an uncreated aseitic being - God - could never alone explore or ever directly experience: death, and all the exotic abstractions associated to it. — John Zande

truth hit me in that moment. All my life, I've been running. Running to the next greatest thing. An adventurer. A thrill seeker. Hungry for more. If things got hard, fight or flight. I would kick and scream for a while, and when that didn't yield the proper results, I would take flight. It happened in my closest relationships. Including my arguments with Gabe. If I was not able to win or be understood, I'd grow silent and escape. Far away. To a place that allowed me to maintain control. But the silent treatment and hibernation never brought relief; instead, I felt abandoned by my own doing. All alone. By my own choosing. This defense of self-preservation left me on the altar of self-destruction. My greatest fear is feeling trapped - it has followed me all my life. — Rebekah Lyons

You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone. — A. L. Kennedy

It is like choosing whether to cut off one's right hand or one's left hand. It is like having to decide whether to save your drowning mother, knowing that you may both drown, or swimming to shore alone, knowing that you can only save yourself. If that is your dilemma, which way is right? Which way would you choose? — Cara Chow

Every one of us alone has the power to direct the course of our lives by choosing what actions we will or won't taken..

While sometimes it's easier to believe you don't have a choice, The reality in that..
YOU ALWAYS HAVE A
CHOICE TO BEHAVE
DIFFERENTY — Francine Ward

If you dwell in the darkness, you can see in the dark and look into the light.
But in choosing the darkness, you know you are destined to walk alone. — Colin Bateman

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn't be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead — Gustave Flaubert

Let him be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others eyes. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language? — Pat Conroy

Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes. — Augusten Burroughs

A man who chooses a religion is also choosing a way of worshipping and of sharing the mysteries collectively. However, he alone is responsible for how he behaves on his path and has no right to make his religion responsible for his steps and his decisions. — Paulo Coelho

Jackson blinked again, almost at a loss for words as he ignored the mini Cooper reference, a term the girls loved and had begun calling their offspring. Having four women all entering the second trimester of their pregnancy at the same time was just about killing the brothers. How the hell had he become part of this? He wasn't married to any of them, and yet now he was the peanut butter bearer. Hell. "Four ... four types of peanut butter?" Jackson asked. "Yes. Four. I'm alone in the house with four pregnant women who all want peanut butter of their own choosing. For the love of God, help me." The panic in his brother's voice made Jackson smile. Matt had the pre-daddy jitters. In fact, all his brothers did. — Carrie Ann Ryan

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. — Cormac McCarthy

Once, when they were alone in the office, Collette had startled her by pausing at her desk and saying, darkly, that Crystal was an example to young women, choosing life. For a moment Crystal had seen herself as Collette might: a tragic figure, a fallen woman, but, when it came down to it, contrite and virtuous, taking responsibility for her mistake. But then Collette had elaborated: "If girls are going to run around like that, they should pay. — Kirstin Valdez Quade

Things external to her may have their own weight and dimension: but within inside us she gives them such measures as she wills: death is terrifying to Cicero, desirable to Cato, indifferent to Socrates. Health, consciousness, authority, knowledge, beauty and their opposites doff their garments as they enter the soul and receive new vestments, coloured with qualities of her own choosing: brown or green; light or dark; bitter or sweet, deep or shallow, as it pleases each of the individual souls, who have not agreed together on the truth of their practices, rules or ideas. Each soul is Queen in her own state. So let us no longer seek excuses from the external qualities of anything, the responsibility lies within ourselves. Our good or our bad depends on us alone. So let us make our offertories and our vows to ourselves not to Fortune: she has no power over our behaviour, on the contrary our souls drag Fortune in their train and mould her to their own idea. — Michel De Montaigne

People should be _very_ careful when choosing the future fathers and mothers of their children. For that reason alone, it is extremely mean to demand a marriage certificate for life, just for one night of embracement. — Wilhelm Reich

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. — Margaret Sanger

A formal period in life where there isn't the worry of another person's dramas and insecurities can be of great advantage, especially when used for growing into the full and wholesome beings we intended to be when choosing to come to this material manifestation.
"Even after ending a long relationship or a marriage, it seems normal to have some alone-time to reflect, meditate, explore areas of interest, find meaning in one's suffering and try to placate the void felt in the heart before attempting to enter into new relationships, otherwise the same old mistakes will surely re-emerge.
"Once we're at the stage of life where we can stand our own silence, where we've made peace with our past, where we've accepted and grown from its lessons, and we would like to share our independence without becoming dependent on someone else for love and affection, then we can choose to commit to a two bodied intimate relationship. — Nityananda Das

I'm not backing out of the fight. I'm just choosing not to participate in it, especially when I know I don't deserve to even participate, let alone win. — Rachel Van Dyken

Better to go hungry than to be alone. Because when you're alone - and I'm talking here
about an enforced solitude not of our choosing - it's as if you were no longer part of the
human race — Paulo Coelho