“We are made alone. That aloneness is our freedom. And it is not against love. In fact, only a person who is alone and knows how to be alone will be able to love. This is the paradox of love: That only the person who is alone can love, and only the person who loves becomes alone. They come together. So if you are not capable of being alone, you will not be capable of being in love either. Then all your so-called love will be just an escape from yourself. It will not be real love, it will not be real relating. Who will relate with whom? You have not even related with yourself; how can you relate with the other? You are not there—who is going to relate with others? So a false kind of love exists in the world: You are trying to escape from yourself, the other is trying to escape from herself or himself, and you are both seeking shelter in each other. It is a mutual deception.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 312)
“She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wilderness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 126)
“She’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 5)
“Learn to be alone, but never get too attached to your aloneness. Remain capable of relating with others. Learn to meditate, but don’t move so far to an extreme that you become incapable of love. Be silent, peaceful, still, but don’t get obsessed by this stillness, or you will not be able to face the marketplace. It is easy to be silent when you are alone. It is difficult to be silent when you are with people, but that difficulty has to be faced. Once you are able to be silent with people, you have attained; now nothing can destroy it.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 163)
“It can be very difficult to have one’s own space. But unless you have your own space, you will never become acquainted with your own being. You will never come to know who you are. Always engaged, always occupied in a thousand and one things—in relationships, in worldly affairs, anxieties, plans, future, past—one continuously lives on the surface. If you love yourself deeply and go down into yourself, you will be ready to love others even more deeply, because one who does not know oneself cannot love very deeply.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 153)
