Quotes & Sayings About The Power Of Being Alone

The Temperature is Rising
The heartbeat quickens my breath is controlled,my senses are illuminated like a mother to her young. This feeling I have I've know it before, when the gates are opened I'll remember the beginning. Awaiting, dreaming imagining the endless possibilities of moments together as I give into my desires. My body reacts it has a mind of its own leaving little clues yet I continue on.
Poised and professional I cross my origin the passion that awaits it stirs like a simmer. The sweet aroma a treat being made just for him I know he will like, the hunger in his eyes his mouth soft and strong it only took me a moment as he continued to look on. I didn't even recognize my sound as I was in a sphere all alone I hoped and imagined it would be but my mind was left in awe like sweet chocolate after a meal. — M.I. Ghostwriter

It is difficult to put into words what I suffered-the longing that seemed to be tearing my heart out by the roots, the dreadful sense of being alone in an empty universe, the agonies that thrilled through me as if the blood were running ice-cold through my veins, the disgust with living, the impossibility of dying. Shakespeare himself never described this torture; but he counts it, in Hamlet, among the terrible of all the evils of existence. I had stopped composing; my mind seemed to become feebler as my feelings grew more intense. I did nothing. One power was left to me-to suffer. — Hector Berlioz

Enlightened enquiry alone leads to liberation. Supernatural powers are all illusory appearances created by the power of maya (mayashakti). Self-realization which is permanent is the only true accomplishment (siddhi). Accomplishments which appear and disappear, being the effect of maya, cannot be real. They are accomplished with the object of enjoying fame, pleasures, etc. They come unsought to some persons through their karma. Know that union with Brahman is the real aim of all accomplishments. This is also the state of liberation (aikya mukti) known as union (sayujya). — Ramana Maharshi

She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day.
When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the corn field in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too.
"You're a really good poet Ruth," she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me. — Alice Sebold

Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made. Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When standing in the middle of the marvelous mountains and deep forests, in the earthy smell of all beginnings and endings, I often find myself asking what I have if all my possessions were taken away. Without money, car, house; or power and fame, if there are any, who am I?
In that very moment, being away from the external voices and left alone in nature, I find my answer. — Zi Nguyen

Unhappy memories are persistent. They're specific, and it's the details that refuse to leave us alone. Though a happy memory may stay with you just as long as one that makes you miserable, what you remember softens over time. What you recall is simply that you were happy, not necessarily the individual moments that brought about your joy.
But the memory of something painful does just the opposite. It retains its original shape, all bony fingers and pointy elbows. Every time it returns, you get a quick poke in the eye or jab in the stomach. The memory of being unhappy has the power to hurt us long after the fact. We feel the injury anew each and every time we think of it. — Cameron Dokey

As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them. — Tench Coxe

How do you know when you're in love?
...
When you look into his eyes, and you're more alive than you've ever felt," Annebet said. "When the very breath you take sends both fear and joy rushing through you, and you feel as if you might die if you can't see him again
right now. When you want to shout and laugh and cry and curse all at once, when you burn for him to touch you, to make love to you, even though all your life you've been told that you mustn't, that you shouldn't, that you can't. It's when you feel yourself on the verge of becoming everything you've evre dreamed of being, when you can nearly touch your own potential because this other person gives you all of his strength and his power and you know he'd give you the very breath from his lungs if you asked. And you realize that you'll never be alone again because there's a piece of him that you'll carry with you, forever, in your heart. A heart that is infinitely bigger than it was just a week or two ago. — Suzanne Brockmann

As the time of their probation was closing, the antediluvians gave themselves up to exciting amusements and festivities. Those who possessed influence and power were bent on keeping the minds of the people engrossed with mirth and pleasure, lest any should be impressed by the last solemn warning. Do we not see the same repeated in our day? While God's servants are giving the message that the end of all things is at hand, the world is absorbed in amusements and pleasure seeking. There is a constant round of excitement that causes indifference to God and prevents the people from being impressed by the truths which alone can save them from the coming destruction. — Ellen G. White

Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/
passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant
to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a "dark
continent" to penetrate and to "pacify." (We know what "pacify" means in terms of
scotomizing the other and misrecognizing the self.) Conquering her, they've made
haste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man has
of getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for his
own, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understand
how man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, might
feel resentment and fear of being "taken" by the woman, of being lost in her,
absorbed, or alone. — Helene Cixous

Pray only thus: Our Father, without beginning and without end, like the heavens! May Thy being alone be holy. May power be Thine alone, so that Thy will may be done, without beginning and without end, on earth. Give me the food of life this present day. Efface my former mistakes and wipe them out, as I efface and wipe out all the mistakes my brothers have made; that I may not fall into temptation, but be saved from evil. For the power and strength are Thine, and the decision is Thine. — Leo Tolstoy

He stands apart with Patroclus, his beloved through all eternity, and Patroclus - who loves Achilles but not as much as he is loved - waits for Achilles to move. His deference to Achilles is different from that of others, They honour and respect him, keep a wise distance, because Achilles was better than the rest. Better at being human. Fighting, singing, speaking, raging (oh, he is good at that still). Killing. But Patroclus alone is humbled by Achilles' love. Only a fool thinks that to be more loved than loving gives you power. Only a fool vaunts it and displays his own littleness by bragging to his friends and making capricious demands of his lover. Patroclus isn't a fool. He knows that he is less than Achilles even in this. Humbled by the intensity of Achilles' love he loves him back with all his large, though lesser, heart. — Elizabeth Cook

Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once ... Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one's own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound. — Peter Matthiessen

At times, one of man's greater needs is freedom from himself, and this freedom is likely to be increasingly threatened by population and economic pressures, by dogmas of organizations exalting power and bigness, and by old ideas that Nature exists only to be conquered. The trapper or the ex-trapper or the frank recluse is not alone in needing, on occasion, freedom from man to escape being psychologically overwhelmed by Man as a mass phenomenon. — Paul Errington

One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called "the last of the human freedoms" - the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Viktor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response. — Stephen R. Covey

That's one reason I was so passionate about establishing the Magdalene community. Mary Magdalene was the name of the first person to preach about resurrection, and she experienced deep healing from old wounds. In the accounts of the resurrection stories offered in the Gospels, it seems like in each story Jesus lingers to meet Magdalene. In the account of the resurrection in the Gospel of John, two disciples run into the tomb and see the shroud that Jesus had been wrapped in. They leave scared, and Magdalene is left alone. As she stands outside the tomb, she bends over to look into the tomb. Jesus speaks to her. The bond and power of grace seem to bring her into the heart of God. I wanted to name the community in her honor and for it to be a sanctuary. I knew that in order to heal people, women needed a place to speak their truth in love without fear of being judged, in part because I needed that place. — Becca Stevens

Be your own source of strength and comfort. Believe that you are in love, happy, and fulfilled because you started by feeling that way about yourself, alone. Then the power of being together is amplified and you will experience the kind of joy that you can't begin to imagine. It starts within you and no one else. — Carol Lin

The Strongman continued his mental review. "And the petty little saints in the town were . . . obscure, don't you see, far from help, far from the mainstream, alone amid the rolling farmlands . . . unknown. It was a perfect place to begin the process." His beastly face grew tight and bitter. "Until they started praying. Until they ceased being so comfortable and started weeping before God! Until they began to reclaim the power of the . . ." The Strongman sealed his lips. "The Cross?" the aide volunteered. — Frank E. Peretti

To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others - even those with whom we are in conflict - love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. I alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love as power both to resist in our nature what we know we we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal. — Chris Hedges

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. — Franz Kafka

Mary sat on a bench in the park. It was the middle of the night and she was alone and she felt at peace. She leaned back and looked upward. The sky was endless and expansive and the stars stretched on forever. It made her feel very small but it also made her feel very important. Of all of the things that might have ever had the chance to exist in the history of the universe, she had the privilege of being one of them. A living, thinking, feeling being, with the ability to control her own destiny.
As wondrous and expansive as stars and the entire universe were, none of them had this power. None of them had any control. And yet she felt humbled to be a part of it at all. It felt like a trade-off. In this life you could only be one or the other: wondrous and expansive or small and in control. — Olivia Fuller

Tonight, she felt the full weight of that loss. The loss of a brother who would have stood at her side and fought this battle of manners and politics for her. The loss of a man who would have laughed at her dress and her hair but also been desperate to be alone so he could undo it all for her.
Perhaps she had never stopped being that girl lost in a place where she could never have power. — Kiersten White

Sometimes when we're suffering we feel as if we have been singled out. We wonder why God has picked on us. But my life as the rabbi of a small synagogue taught me that if that's what we think, we are mistaken. We are never alone in our suffering. Scratch the surface of any family, any social gathering, any congregation, and you will find loss and pain there. We may not always be privy to the pain, but it is there just the same. If we had the power to peer inside the heart of any human being, we would uncover there a silent anguish. — Naomi Levy

It is crucial for us to form the habit of holy leisure, of quiet places and times alone with the Lord, so that we will restore our passion and intimacy with Christ. In this way, service will flow out of our life with him, and our activities and abilities will be animated by dependence upon his indwelling power. Restoration and renewal are especially important after periods of intense activity. When we seek and treasure God's intentions and calling, our personal knowledge of him (knowing) shapes our character (being) and conduct (doing). Although we are more inclined to follow Jesus into service than into solitude, the time we spend in "secluded places" with him (Mark 1:35; 6:31) will energize our service. — Kenneth D. Boa

As much as love is the source of power for those who are centred in their hearts, as much fear is the source of illusionary power for those who insist on being led by their heads alone. — Raphael Zernoff

There are stages in the contemplation and endurance of great sorrow, which endow men with the same earnestness and clearness of thought that in some of old took the form of Prophecy. To those who have large capability of loving and suffering, united with great power of firm endurance, there comes a time in their woe, when they are lifted out of the contemplation of their individual case into a
searching inquiry into the nature of their calamity, and the remedy
(if remedy there be) which may prevent its recurrence to others as
well as to themselves.
Hence the beautiful, noble efforts which are from time to time
brought to light, as being continuously made by those who have once hung on the cross of agony, in order that others may not suffer as they have done; one of the grandest ends which sorrow can
accomplish; the sufferer wrestling with God's messenger until a
blessing is left behind, not for one alone but for generations. — Elizabeth Gaskell

In the life of man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land;and after repute, oblivion. Where, then, can man find the power to guide and guard his steps? In one thing and one alone: the love of knowledge. — Marcus Aurelius

The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone - free - the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. — George Orwell

As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. — Helen Fielding

Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all. Your will find yourself, and God will find you in new ways. Silence also brings Sabbath to you. It completes solitude, for without it you cannot be alone. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence we come to attend. Lastly, fasting is done that we many consciously experience the direct sustenance of God to our body and our whole person. — Dallas Willard

the government both in the executive and the legislative branches must carry out in good faith the platforms upon which the party was entrusted with power. But the government is that of the whole people; the party is the instrument through which policies are determined and men chosen to bring them into being. The animosities of elections should have no place in our Government, for government must concern itself alone with the common weal. — George Washington

I got me slave-girls and slaves.' For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's? — Gregory Of Nyssa

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good ... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Parents have such formidable power. They can protect you from all the pain in the world. Or inflict the hardest pain of all. And as children we accept what we get. Perhaps we believe that anything is better than that which we all fear the most. Loneliness. Abandonment. But once you accept that fact that you have always been alone, and will always be, then your perspective can being to change. You can become aware of the small kindnesses, the little comforts. Be grateful for them. And with time you will understand that there is nothing to fear. And much to be grateful for. For me, the realization took a lifetime. Don't let it take you that long, Veronika. (189) — Linda Olsson

Examples out of History, of People free and in the State of Nature, that being met together incorporated and began a Common-wealth. And if the want of such instances be an argument to prove that Government were not, nor could not be so begun, I suppose the contenders for Parernal Empire were better let it alone, than urge it against natural Liberty. For if they can give so many instances out of History, of Governments begun upon Paternal Right, I think (though at best an Argument from what has been, to what should of right be, has no great force) one might, without any great danger, yield them the cause. But if I might advise the Original of Governments, as they have begun de facto, lest they should find at the foundation of most of them, something very little favourable to the design they promote, and such a power as they contend for. — John Locke

I wanted tolerance. I wanted everybody to leave everybody else alone, regardless of their religious beliefs, regardless of their political affiliation. I wanted people to like each other. Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance. I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy. I wondered whether any human being could be an enemy of God. — Donald Miller

Amongst the many trials to which the human mind is subjected, that of holding intercourse, real or imaginary, with the world of spirits: of finding itself alone with a being terrific and awful, whose nature and power are unknown, has been justly considered the most severe. — Joanna Baillie

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within. — May Sarton

An ethic of maternalism was central to the utopianism of 19th century feminists. I don't think that today's women see motherhood as a source of personal power, let alone political power. I don't think that women now have that same sense that their lives as mothers gives them any special power or virtue. I think women see their lives as mothers as an adjunct to their working lives - a fulfilling and important adjunct, to be sure - but something they do in addition to working in the public realm, not because being a wife and mother gives them a distinct edge in improving the world as we know it. — Clare Wright

Do not throw that at me!" Kane's voice suddenly shouted.

Keela cackled. "It's just a tub of butter, you big baby."

"It's a frozen tub of butter, so you might as well throw a brick at my head!"

"That can be arranged, big man."

"You're an evil little person, I hope you know that."

"I do."

I laughed at their conversation and sunk back into my sofa, tugging my blanket farther up my body.

"Leave him alone, Keela."

I heard something being set down on either the kitchen counter or table. It dropped with a thud. "You're lucky she wants you alive and unharmed."

"And you're lucky she wants you here often, otherwise I'd ban you from ever entering this building."

Keela seethed. "You've gone mad with power."

I smiled. — L.A. Casey

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing - as every parent fears - that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader. — Michael Chabon

Sometimes I worry, for myself, that I've stopped being amazed at certain things, or I've taken for granted a set of ideas about how the world works, what people are doing with each other or alone, all the fundamental relationships in the world. I worry that I start taking it for granted and stop feeling the intensity of it because of language. Language starts to shut down the strength and power and strangeness of what it means to be a person in the world. — Ben Marcus

If [the heavyweights] become champions they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust ... Dempsey was alone and Tunney could never explain himself and Sharkey could never believe himself nor Schmeling nor Braddock, and Carnera was sad and Baer an indecipherable clown; great heavyweights like Louis had the loneliness of the ages in their silence, and men like Marciano were mystified by a power which seemed to have been granted them. With the advent, however, of the great modern Black heavyweights, Patterson, Liston, then Clay and Frazier, perhaps the loneliness gave way to what it had been protecting itself against - a surrealistic situation unstable beyond belief. Being a Black heavyweight champion in the second half of the twentieth century (with Black revolutions opening all over the world) was now not unlike being Jack Johnson, Malcolm X and Frank Costello all in one ... — Joyce Carol Oates

I did not even know who Christ was, that He was God. I had not the faintest idea that there existed such a thing as the Blessed Sacrament. I thought churches were simply places where people got together and sang a few hymns. And yet now I tell you, you who are now what I once was, unbelievers, it is that Sacrament, and that alone, the Christ living in our midst, and sacrificed by us, and for us and with us, in the clean and perpetual Sacrifice, it is He alone Who holds our world together, and keeps us all from being poured headlong and immediately into the pit of our eternal destruction. And I tell you there is a power that goes forth from that Sacrament, a power of light and truth, even into the hearts of those who have heard nothing of Him and seem to be incapable of belief. — Thomas Merton

The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I'm surprised there weren't more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call 'passing') by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle. — Jennifer S. Alderson