Top 100 Life Of Solitude Quotes
#1. An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.
Edmund Burke
#2. Go cherish your soul; express companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then will the faculties rise fair and full within.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. 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
#4. All human beings go through a previous life ... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?
Honore De Balzac
#5. The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.
Helen Waddell
#6. Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving one's work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the 'venture of the public realm.
Hannah Arendt
#7. Only in a state of solitude, when you willingly stay face to face with God, can He help you to open yourself, and show the impurities preventing you from moving forward and help you to identify your unique gift, life mission and destination
Sunday Adelaja
#8. In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding ...
Solitude molds self-righteous people into gentle, caring, forgiving persons who are so deeply convinced of their own great sinfulness and so fully aware of God's even greater mercy that their life itself becomes ministry.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#9. However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.
Michael Foley
#10. The death of my mother permanently affects my happiness, more even than I should have anticipated, though I always knew that I must feel the separation at first as a severe wrench. But I did not apprehend, during her life, to what a degree she prevented me from feeling heart-solitude ...
Sara Coleridge
#11. In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find 'the ultimate questioner' - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question.
Kedar Joshi
#12. Find some time to seclude yourself from the fuss of life and be face to face with yourself and God
Sunday Adelaja
#13. But very little of it can do more
than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably
difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done
slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying
water in a sieve.
Mary Oliver
#14. One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.
Richard Ford
#15. Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.
Ingmar Bergman
#16. But here, is this place of eternal bareness and solitude, it seemed that life could never have been. The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation.
Clark Ashton Smith
#17. Personally, I'd rather grow old alone than in the company of anyone I've met so far. I don't experience myself as lonely, incomplete, or unfulfilled, but I don't talk about that much. It seems to piss people off
especially men. (Kinsey Millhone)
Sue Grafton
#18. Solitude is not the absence of company, but the moment when our soul is free to speak to us and help us decide what to do with our life.
Paulo Coelho
#19. Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.
Kathleen Norris
#20. Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
Edith Wharton
#21. You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#22. A Warrior of Light needs love.
Love and affection are part of his nature.
He makes use of solitude,
but is not used by it.
Paulo Coelho
#23. I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.
Werner Herzog
#24. Mistake not. Those pleasures are not pleasures that trouble the quiet and tranquillity of thy life.
Jeremy Taylor
#25. Life has ill-prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers.
Laurie R. King
#26. Fine. If you want to stay in that chair and feel sorry for yourself for the rest of your life, who am I to stop you? But if the solitude you're so desperately clinging to ever starts to get too dull and lonely, just let me know.
Sorcha MacMurrough
#27. Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#29. It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.
Erica Jong
#30. People underestimate the stars and the connectedness they bring between spirit and matter. More often than not, when lost, we seek solitude in staring into the darkness hoping something speaks back to us, usually through a feeling, a thought or a rare occurrence of a shooting star.
Nikki Rowe
#31. Holding on for dear life, I was overcome with the perfect nearness of him, the ache of human solitude nearly conquered.
Jennifer DeLucy
#32. Live in the midst of q crowd, but think like you're in the solitude.
Debasish Mridha
#33. Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent - how the tilt of a skull could change a life! - Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from
Ian McEwan
#34. Just as the body takes time to recover from an infection that has afflicted it, so the soul needs times of silence and solitude for its recovery from the insane pace of modern life.
Howard Baker
#35. Solitude is not a way of running away from life ... from our feelings. On the contrary. This is the time we sort them out, air them, get over them, and go on without the burden of yesterday.
Joan D. Chittister
#36. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#37. I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#38. Nevertheless, in the impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such a clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#39. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Fernando Pessoa
#40. If you feel all damp and lonely like a mushroom, find the thick, creamy soup of joyfulness and just dive into it in order to make life tastier
Munia Khan
#41. If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.
Thomas Ligotti
#42. If man will understand the real essence of staying in the solitude with his Maker alone, he will never spend all his time with the crowd always
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#43. We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.
Parker J. Palmer
#45. Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of.
Samuel Beckett
#46. Stars also symbolize the cycle of life, solitude and gravity. They glow in the dark energy that's the majority of space, and remind us that even in the pitch black, there's always something that can shine.
L.J. Shen
#47. Talk to the creator in a state of peace and solitude and ask Him a question concerning the purpose of your living
Sunday Adelaja
#48. Perhaps farewells create new territories, or they send us back to the only territory that truly belongs to us, that of solitude.
Andres Neuman
#49. When I was going into one of my first meditation retreats, I asked my father, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, for some advice. He said, "How you act when you're alone affects the rest of your life." Even in solitude, the ruler engages in virtue.
Sakyong Mipham
#50. To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.
Harold Bloom
#51. When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.
Jules Verne
#52. I can either live a life of hate and solitude, or I can do what I feel is right and hope for the same in return.
Joseph R. Lallo
#53. Losing someone close to you is more haunting than a life of cursed solitude.
~The Moon Master
Clara Diane Thompson
#54. The threat of rain appears to have nothing to do with Joao Elvas's desire to be alone, and one must not forget that, strange as it may seem, some men can spend their entire life alone and enjoy solitude, especially if it is raining and their crust is hard.
Jose Saramago
#55. I do not wish to shine. I prefer shadows, quiet, periods of solitude. I do not wish to be noticed. If one is all but invisible to others, one cannot be envied, inspire anger or suspicion. Near invisibility is a way of life that I recommend.
Dean Koontz
#56. The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout.
Samuel Johnson
#57. Emily Dickinson has haunted my life - her poems, her persona, all the tales about her solitude. Ever since I discovered her in the seventh grade, I've had a crush on that spinster in white, who had such a heroic and startling inner landscape of her own.
Jerome Charyn
#58. He who has little communication with people is seldom a misanthrope. True misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world. This is because it is practical experience of life, and certainly not philosophy, that makes people hate their fellows.
Giacomo Leopardi
#59. When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.
Gail Honeyman
#60. Go slow, my life, go slow. Let me enjoy the beauty of silence, serenity, and solitude.
Debasish Mridha
#61. I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.
Thaddeus Stevens
#63. One whose chief regard is for his own mind, and for the divinity within him and the service of its goodness, will strike no poses, utter no complaints, and crave neither for solitude nor yet for a crowd. Best of all, his life will be free from continual pursuing and avoiding.
Marcus Aurelius
#64. Just as Love is the divine condition, so solitude is the human condition. And for those who understand the miracle of life, those two states peacefully coexist.
Paulo Coelho
#66. Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.
Gretel Ehrlich
#67. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#68. We must understand the connection between inner solitude and inner silence; they are inseparable. All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.
Richard J. Foster
#69. The cure for all the illness of life is stored in the inner depth of life itself, the access to which becomes possible when we are alone. This solitude is a world in itself, full of wonders and resources unthought of. It is absurdly near; yet so unapproachably distant.
Rabindranath Tagore
#70. But I would tell Mother none of this. Nor would I tell her that at the hour of his death, I was floating free in the ocean, in a solitude I would remember all of my life, the gulls cawing over my head and the white flag flying at the top of the pole.
Sue Monk Kidd
#71. All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.
Francoise Sagan
#72. He thought about his people without sentimentalily, with a strick closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated the most.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#73. I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.
Michael Collins
#74. We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.
Michael Meade
#75. Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes.
Thomas Merton
#76. I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and doubly, trebly so, for her.
Miles Franklin
#77. It is in solitude that we discover that being is more important than having and that we are worth more than the results of our efforts.
In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended but a gift to be shared.
Henri Nouwen
#78. We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
George Santayana
#79. The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude - both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice - make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells.
Yiyun Li
#80. Solitude and quiet connect you to your creative source and release the limitless intelligence of Life.
Robin S. Sharma
#81. Thus, in spite of his solitude, or in consequence of his solitude, his life was exceedingly full.
Leo Tolstoy
#82. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau
#83. For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of 'old people' and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end.
Irene Nemirovsky
#84. Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death-
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
Philip Larkin
#85. The best lessons of life are learnt in silence and solitude.
Abhijit Naskar
#86. Writing is a lonely business, which if allowed publicity and socializing it might deteriorate. Supportive people understand the need of a writer to withdraw to the solitude of oneself.
Gloria D. Gonsalves
#87. I had drawn away into the salt,
myself, a shell
emptied of life.
Hilda Doolittle
#88. I spent half my childhood in the shadows. Hiding from my father or my brother. Creeping from a place of solitude to another. Seeing while unseen, and pretending I was a part of what I saw. Making up a life where I wasn't an outcast.
Joe Abercrombie
#89. What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
George Santayana
#90. Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition ...
Amelia E. Barr
#91. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life.
Charles Dickens
#92. The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.
Gaston Bachelard
#93. There are beauties of character which, like the night-blooming cereus, are closed against the glare and turbulence of every-day life, and bloom only in shade and solitude, and beneath the quiet stars.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#94. There is a vast difference between an Apostolic life and the solitude of the Carthusians. The latter is truly very holy but is not suited to those whom God has called to the former, which is in itself more excellent.
Vincent De Paul
#95. With so much trauma and drama in everyday life, the beauty of peace and solitude beckons like an oasis in a barren wasteland.
Jo Ann V. Glim
#96. I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting ...
Gaston Bachelard
#97. Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.
Louis Kronenberger
#98. No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
Thomas De Quincey
#100. The individual who has experienced solitude will not easily become a victim of mass suggestion.
Albert Einstein
