Solitude & Stillness

I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked; for I was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics, and had tasted the sweets of solitude and stoicism, and I found something profane in the hours of amusing gossip into which she drew me...

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

The very word Islam means peace, which is non-violence.

Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth

I have always believed that exercise is the key not only to physical health but to peace of mind.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings & Essays

If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space.

Carl Sagan Cosmos & Pale Blue Dot

The fountain of death makes the still water of life play.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali & Stray Birds

If you sing of beauty though alone in the heart of the desert you will have an audience.

Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition

They were walking side by side, but each was alone.

Simone de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity

In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power.

Sun Tzu The Art of War

Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.

Blaise Pascal Pensées

You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

Inwardly everything should be different but our outward face should conform to the crowd.

Seneca Moral Letters to Lucilius

He who has studied Pythagoras and his speculations on the Monad, which, after having emanated the Duad retires into silence and darkness, and thus creates the Triad can realize whence came the philosophy of the great Samian Sage, and after him that of Socrates and Plato.

Socrates Apology (via Plato)

[Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato….  He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, "Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.

Plato The Republic & Dialogues

The superior man is quiet and calm, waiting for the appointments of Heaven, while the mean man walks in dangerous paths, looking for lucky occurrences.

Confucius The Analects (Lunyu)

Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.

Gautama Buddha Dhammapada & Sutta Pitaka

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.

Rumi Masnavi & Divan-e Shams

God himself cannot subsist without wise men," said Luther, and with good reason; but "God can still less subsist without unwise men,"—good Luther did not say that!

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus & Notebooks

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but He does what is still more wonderful: He makes saints out of sinners.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Baruch Spinoza Ethics (Ethica)

Hindus are "a peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves.

Voltaire Candide & Philosophical Dictionary

Farewell, good Strato. — Caesar now be still: I kill'd not thee with half so good a will.

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets