It is a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Categorized in : Art Practice Solitude

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

recovery courage inspirational

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

motivational inspirational love

Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

what-matters knowing life

I must try to be alone for part of each year...and part of each day...in order to keep my core, my center...Women must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities. She must be the pioneer of achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

mom order years

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

faith love-is life

Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

strength courage wish

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

mothers-day motherhood mom

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

women essence order

I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints - to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

spiritual peace life

The most exhausting thing you can do is to be inauthentic.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

exhausting vision can-do

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. Only when one is connected to one's own core is.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

loneliness-and-solitude self-esteem inspirational

Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

motivational inspirational peace

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

shells beautiful beach

Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

stills cute love

Go with the pain, let it take you. Open your palms and your body to the pain. It comes in waves like the tide and you must be open as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up and then, retreating, leaving you empty and clear.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

pain beach lying

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

flower beautiful beauty

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

prayer mistake writing

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

anniversary want doors

Only when a tree has fallen can you take the measure of it. It is the same with a man.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

suicide men death

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

losing-someone grief grieving