Top 200 Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We must relearn to be alone.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

52. “A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

53. “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

54. “The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

55. “But I want first of all- in fact, as an end to these other desires- to be at peace with myself.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

56. “In our family an experience was not finished, nor truly experienced, unless written down and shared with another.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

57. “People don’t want to be understood – I mean not completely. It’s too destructive. Then they haven’t anything left. They don’t want complete sympathy or complete understanding. They want to be treated carelessly and taken for granted lots of times.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

58. “After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

59. “One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

60. “What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it – like a secret vice!”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

61. “It is hard to recognize, or even to describe, but I think this freedom is the real reason the book continues to be so well loved and so well read after all these years. I am talking about the freedom that comes from choosing to remain open, as my mother did, to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

62. “The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

63. “People, too, become like islands in such an atmosphere, self-contained, whole and serene; respecting other people’s solitude, not intruding on their shores, standing back in reverence before the miracle of another individual. ‘No man is an island,’ said John Donne. I feel we are all islands – in a common sea. We.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

64. “It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

65. “We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather – for I believe the heart is infinite – modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

66. “Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

67. “People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that – just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

68. “It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feelings one can go through in one day.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

70. “Him that I love, I wish to be free – even from me.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

71. “I think best with a pencil in my hand.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

72. “The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

73. “I feel we are all islands – in a common sea.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

74. “Charles Morgan describes as “the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

75. “Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

76. “Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

77. “For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

78. “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.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

79. “People talk about love as if it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

80. “For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

81. “Woman must be the pioneer in this turning inward for strength. In a sense, she has always been the pioneer.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

82. “Marriage should, I think, always be a little bit hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

83. “The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there. Enjoy the moment, even if it means merely a walk in the country.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

84. “For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

85. “Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

86. “The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

87. “I can conceive of ‘falling in love’ over and over again. But ‘marriage,’ this richness of life itself, I cannot conceive of having again – or with anyone else. In this sense ‘marriage’ seems to me indissoluble.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

88. “For the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

89. “Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt A pain undiagnosable but felt.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

90. “I shall ask into my shell only those friends with whom I can be completely honest. I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

91. “I want to be pure in heart – but I like to wear my purple dress.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

92. “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

93. “For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

94. “Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one’s resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

95. “Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

96. “If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

97. “Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

98. “Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves; that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

99. “For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

100. “Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh