Solitude/Self-reliance

To decide, to be at the level of choice, is to take responsibility for your life and to be in control of your life.

-- Abbie M. Dale

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

-- John Donne, Meditation XVII

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

-- Albert Einstein

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

-- Dag Hammarskjold

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.

-- Charles Evans Hughes

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

-- Tom Robbins

Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward.

-- Patricia Sampson

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

-- George Bernard Shaw

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

-- Henry David Thoreau

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

-- Virginia Woolf