Top 100 On Solitude Quotes
#1. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me. I took a drink of wine. Suddenly
Charles Bukowski
#2. Still, I'm lucky: I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me. I sit in bed and wait for the whole thing to go one way or the other. just like everybody else.
Charles Bukowski
#3. I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. I look like a man in a death camp.
I
am.
still, I'm lucky: I feat on solitude, I
will never miss the crowd.
Charles Bukowski
#5. 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
#6. My eyes locked on his and I seemed to get caught in his gaze. We didn't speak, I just looked at his handsome face and memorized every inch of it. The music playing in the background, the stars shining down on us, the solitude, all of it was perfect and almost magical.
Kirsty Moseley
#7. Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.
Paul Brunton
#9. The bitter pinecone may be eaten, The mist on high give nourishment. The whole world takes to go-and-getting; My way alone is difficult.
Du Fu
#10. If I'm going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I've got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don't turn on music or the TV unless I really need to.
Richard Rohr
#11. On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.
Soren Kierkegaard
#12. On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#13. I think I'll feel out of place wherever I go on earth, forever. But that's fine. I have to make my peace with that.
Laura Marling
#14. Most people have never known solitude ... But there are a few of the other kind who can go back to their rooms anywhere and close the door on the whole world, and feel that they need never emerge.
Louis Aragon
#15. Abundant feeling of your presence in front of Allah is enjoy full solitude state where you are in bodily on earth and souly at somewhere on universe
M.i.shaikh My Self
#16. Go, little Book! From this my solitude
I cast thee on the Waters,
go thy ways:
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The World will find thee after many days.
Be it with thee according to thy worth:
Go, little Book; in faith I send thee forth.
Robert Southey
#17. Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.
Eileen Myles
#18. 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
#19. The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#20. Life took on quite a special meaning in this early morning solitude.
Henning Mankell
#21. The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one's mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible.
Fennel Hudson
#22. Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why.
Thomas L. Dumm
#23. For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer's unreturning track.
Christina Rossetti
#24. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.
May Sarton
#27. That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.
Charles Caleb Colton
#28. Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.
Sebastian Faulks
#29. If I'm intelligent at all I'll stay out of the woman game. But it's difficult. I had four years of perfect solitude and strength and then one knocked on the door ...
Charles Bukowski
#30. Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the light-hearted and loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit awhile in his unobtrusive company, practicing for solitude, sobering their minds in the man's rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#31. On the other side of the curtain, children were squabbling, a baby was crying, and there was the smell of rat-and-cabbage casserole. Someone was sharpening an axe. And someone else was snoring. For a dwarf in Ankh-Morpork, solitude was something that you had to cultivate on the inside. Books
Terry Pratchett
#32. Society is in this respect like a fire-the wise man warming himself at a proper distance from it; not coming too close, like the fool, who, on getting scorched, runs away and shivers in solitude, loud in his complaint that the fire burns.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#33. Benj had once said, "A man must have a care to what he puts in his mind, for when he's alone on a hillside and draws it out he'll want treasures to be his company, not regrets.
Elizabeth Yates
#34. I hold the most archaic values on earth ... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude ... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.
Gary Snyder
#35. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#36. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
[The Minotaur]
Albert Camus
#37. There were more problems with solitude than just being horny and bored. If you didn't have anyone to talk to for days on end, you didn't have anyone to let you know whether you were going nuts or not.
Tad Williams
#38. The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, 'Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There's already enough beauty where you are.
Rachael Wade
#39. I had to learn - since I'm divorced now and everyone is like, 'Oh my God, you're single, what's going on?' - that if I don't like to spend time with myself, how can I ask someone else to enjoy spending time with me? I'm getting to learn how to enjoy my solitude and have a good time.
Gabrielle Union
#40. My solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#41. Obviously a child can never conceive solitude if his parents aren't living it somewhere themselves. I don't mean that to be alone you have to get down on your knees for an hour in a yoga posture.
Henri Nouwen
#42. I love this constant motion between ' Solitude' and ' Loneliness '. On one end it's the desire and achievement of being alone ( glorious) on the other it's the utter despair and pain of being alone..
Anubhav Mishra
#43. Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#44. I fear that moments of quietude are on the endangered list; right behind solitude.
Nanette L. Avery
#45. She lives as if she is constantly on the brink of some great fulfillment. As if she were waiting for Prince Charming to take her away "from all this". All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else?
Erica Jong
#46. On the way home my father said tiredly he hoped some day I'd realize it was necessary to live with people. I didn't understand him. He said a lot of other things that made me feel sorry for him, because he just couldn't stand up to a situation.
Dan J. Marlowe
#48. I have always enjoyed my solitude. It gives me time to think and to write.
Avijeet Das
#49. We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.
Storm Jameson
#50. I love the solitude of being on a plane and finally getting to read an entire book and being left alone.
Christina Ricci
#51. Another one of the line-item vetoes in the "never drink alone" rule book is that you're allowed to drink alone while traveling. Who else could possibly join you? I loved drinking alone in distant bars, staying on speaking terms with my own solitude.
Sarah Hepola
#52. I think solitude is a really positive thing. I cherish solitude immensely. In today's society, there's so much pressure to communicate, eat out, be friends with people. Why can't you read a book on your own? Why have you got to have a book club?
Nicky Wire
#53. Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.
Philip Larkin
#54. Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.
Rebecca Solnit
#55. What is there left for me after my purgatory of solitude? ... I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me ...
J.M. Coetzee
#56. 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
#57. Holding on for dear life, I was overcome with the perfect nearness of him, the ache of human solitude nearly conquered.
Jennifer DeLucy
#58. No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone.
Daphne Kalotay
#59. I write the word solitude on my wall and then below it: Do you know me at all? Are my words just air? Is my heart easy to spare?
Jessica Sorensen
#60. Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)
Sue Monk Kidd
#61. In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#62. Because I need it to be mine alone while I carve it. I need solitude with it as I shape it. When I'm finished, then the world can have it, but when I work on it, it is to be my vision and mine alone. I wish no one to see it before it is finished.
Terry Goodkind
#63. She wanted to hold on to the rosy candlelight glow of romance, rather than have to deal with the bright, sometimes glaring day-to-day life with another person. And who could blame her?
Florence Falk
#64. Where some women wanted mere privacy, she yearned for complete solitude that verged on the violent; solitude that forced you constantly back upon yourself, even when you did not want it anymore.
Amanda Coplin
#65. 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
#66. At these moments I took refuge in the most perfect solitude. I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little boat, watching the clouds, and listening to the rippling of the waves, silent and listless.
Mary Shelley
#67. Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
Adrienne Rich
#68. ...whom I have loved
With such communion, that no place on earth
Can ever be a solitude to me
William Wordsworth
#69. We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.
Tamim Ansary
#70. On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.
Evariste Regis Huc
#71. People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.
Sherry Turkle
#72. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.
Charles Bukowski
#73. 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
#74. What an ambiance, and such a pity I'm alone: Candles giving off their glow, gusts of wind and the light tapping of rain on the windowpane - a massage for the mind. And a comforting one, too.
Donna Lynn Hope
#75. But I think there's something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I'm very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.
Andy Serkis
#76. Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#77. What could be more vexing than to be feted on his birthday when he wants nothing so much as to retreat in solitude to ponder the approach of his own mortality?
Richard T. Nash
#78. To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.
Jeanne Moreau
#79. Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.
Gilbert Ryle
#80. In blissful solitude; he then survey'd Hell and the Gulf between, and Satan there Coasting the wall of Heav'n on this side Night In the dun Air sublime,
John Milton
#81. Walking alone is not difficult but when we have walked a mile worth a thousand years with someone then coming back alone is what is difficult.
Faraaz Kazi
#82. How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Virginia Woolf
#83. But there remained a reflective solitude behind that laughter, that nagging sense of completion that didn't sit well on the shoulders of a woman who had just begun to open her eyes to the wide world.
R.A. Salvatore
#84. Leisure, the highest happiness on earth, is seldom enjoyed with perfect satisfaction, except in solitude.
George Zimmerman
#85. What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#86. But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to a few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solititude and want of faith in himself and others.
Joseph Conrad
#87. He'd drop his clothes and slip into the water. The lake's top few inches, after cooking all day in the sun, would be nearly bath warm. "I'd stretch out in the water, " he said, "and lie flat on my back, and look at the stars.
Michael Finkel
#88. I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.
John Fowles
#89. One's better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one's own. In fact it's a terrible business and the task is a hard one.
Claude Monet
#90. On the Sufi path, first you discover the art of being alone amid the crowd. Next you discover the crowd within your solitude - the voices inside you.
Elif Shafak
#91. Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
Albert Camus
#92. As for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plane at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top.
Henry David Thoreau
#93. 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
#94. I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.
Jeanette Winterson
#95. The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee,
And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were Vacancy?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#96. I've always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I'm not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people.
Sara Quin
#97. That's a terrifying prospect for myself, and I'm sure many other people, as well. We leave TVs on in our house. I listen to my record player, constantly, to just hear music. I'm really intrigued by the idea of solitude. I'm excited about that.
Katee Sackhoff
#98. With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication.
Lee Krasner
#99. The sound of darkness was certainly intricately linked to the sense of being alone but unrelated to this was the sound of the palpitations of men and women experiencing the sense of utter solitude. There was no doubt about it. This was a sound audible only on evenings such as this.
Shusaku Endo
#100. Self-reliance can turn a salesman into a merchant; a politician into a statesman; an attorney into a jurist; an unknown youth into a great leader. All are to be tomorrow's big leaders - those who in solitude sit above the clang and dust of time, with the world's secret trembling on their lips.
Newell Dwight Hillis
