Quotes about solitude

To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.

— Joseph Addison

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

— Francis Bacon

A writer who writes, I am alone... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

— Maurice Blanchot

The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The higher we rise, the more isolated we become; all elevations are cold.

— Boufflers

The right to be alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.

— Louis D. Brandeis

Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily.

— Arthur Brisbane

No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.

— Jackson Browne

This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.

— Jean De La Bruyere

In solitude, where we are least alone.

— Lord Byron

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

— Albert Camus

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

— Thomas Carlyle

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

— Robert Cecil

The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

— Anton Chekhov

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

— Winston Churchill

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

— E. M. Cioran

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

— Cyril Connolly

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

— Abraham Cowley

Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore.

— William Cowper

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

— Edward Dahlberg

I'm still the little southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who really didn't feel like she belonged.

— Faye Dunaway

The best thinking has been done in solitude.

— Thomas A. Edison

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

— Albert Einstein

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.

— Albert Einstein

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We walk alone in the world.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We never touch but at points.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

— Euripides

I want to be left alone.

— Greta Garbo

In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?

— Charles De Gaulle

By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear. Dare to look in thy chest; for 'Tis thine own: And tumble up and down what thou findst there. Who cannot rest till he good fellows find, he breaks up house, turns out of doors his mind.

— George Herbert

In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. Tibullus by all means use sometimes to be alone.

— George Herbert

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

— Edward Hoagland

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

— Eric Hoffer

A man by himself is in bad company.

— Eric Hoffer

Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.

— Henry Home

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

— Aldous Huxley

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.

— Samuel Johnson

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

— Samuel Johnson

Solitude is un-American.

— Erica Jong

Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel --or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime.

— John Keats

O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings

— John Keats

The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.

— Omar Khayyam

There is convincing evidence that the search for solitude is not a luxury but a biological need. Just as humans posses a herding instinct that keeps us close to others most of the time, we also have a conflicting drive to seek out solitude. If the distance between ourselves and others becomes too great, we experience isolation and alienation, yet if the proximity to others becomes too close, we feel smothered and trapped.

— Jeffrey Kottler

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

— Milan Kundera

A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

— Walter Savage Landor

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.

— James Russell Lowell

To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self.

— Hamilton Mabie

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

— Thomas Mann

Two Paradises t'were in one, to live in Paradise alone.

— Andrew Marvell

In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.

— William Mathews

An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

— Henry Miller

What call thou solitude? Is not the earth with various living creatures, and the air replenished, and all these at thy command to come and play before thee?

— John Milton

Solitude begets whimsies.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.

— Ovid

One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict -- girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.

— Lord Percival

Life without a friend is death without a witness.

— Spanish Proverb

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

— Thomas De Quincey

If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.

— Jules Renard

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.

— Bertrand Russell

Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio, or looked at a TV They had loneliness and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would mark.

— Carl Sa

The strong man is strongest when alone.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

— Sydney Smith

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

— Henri B. Stendhal

In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.

— Laurence Sterne

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone, I never found the companionable as solitude.

— Henry David Thoreau

I have never found a companion so companionable as solitude.

— Henry David Thoreau

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

— Henry David Thoreau

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

— Henry David Thoreau

Solitude is the despair of fools, the torment of the wicked, and the joy of the good.

— Source Unknown

May God be gracious to each lonely one who walks in silence towards the setting sun.

— Source Unknown

You have already failed if you need a lot of inspectors.

— Source Unknown

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.

— Simone Weil

Go away, I'm all right!

— H.G. Wells

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign in solitude.

— William Wordsworth

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

— May Sarton

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the 'murderous din of our materialism'.

— Thomas Merton

And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Solitude is the most fertile land that yields the bumper crop of mind's creativity

— Anuj Somany

You will never be alone if you like the person you are with when you are by yourself.

— Jeffrey Fry

I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon; and now I cannot find the key to let myself out --- and if the door were to open, I should be almost afraid to come out.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne