Top 100 Quotes About Solitude
#1. No matter how reclusive we tend to be, we picture the after-life as a community of souls. It is one thing to seek privacy in this life; it is another to face eternity alone.
Robert Breault
#2. There is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd.
Claire North
#3. If you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, loneliness is failed solitude.
Sherry Turkle
#4. We learn about life by exploring the texture and depth of space that composes our private inner world. In solitude we revisit our wounded feelings, sins, doubts, and deepest despair, replay poignant memories of loved ones, project what we are becoming, and ascertain the purpose of our being.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#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. In solitude there grows what anyone brings into it, the inner beast too. Therefore solitude is inadvisable to many.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. Legs: the symbol of my solitude, my individual path, my uniqueness. Arms: the symbol of togetherness, my connection to others, my belonging to the human race. My legs make me who I am; they create my solitary path. My arms make me who I belong to; they connect me to the world.
Nicos Hadjicostis
#8. I love and in a way need, a private secret place. It's a kind of deep obsession, but I also love to need and be with friends and the two things often need to be together ... it's a painful conflict that will never be smoothly resolved.
Morris Graves
#9. Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude.
Milan Kundera
#11. We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.
Honore De Balzac
#12. When we begin to look around us, to observe individuals and societies, and to study philosophies and religions, we realize that our loneliness is shared. Our solitude is plural, and our singularity is the similarity between us.
Tariq Ramadan
#13. 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
#14. Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude
they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.
Herb Elliott
#15. 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
#16. The idea of love seemed an invasion," she wrote. "I had thoughts to think, a craft to learn, a self to discover. Solitude was a gift. A world was waiting to welcome me if I was willing to enter it alone.
Kate Bolick
#18. Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.
Charles Baudelaire
#19. Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#20. Humans are all too happy to keep company until the company turns out to be less appealing than solitude.
Thor Benson
#21. The person who abides in solitude and quiet is delivered from fighting three battles: hearing, speech, and sight. Then there remains one battle to fight-the battle of the heart.
Anthony The Great
#22. You've got to stop thinking of consciousness as your own. You're only thinking for yourself when you are by yourself. As soon as you are in the presence of others, your consciousness is linked at some level to those others.
James Rozoff
#23. We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
C.S. Lewis
#24. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.
Rollo May
#26. There is no other company in the world I've found more pleasurable than my own. For no one else has ever been as accepting of me or as thoroughly entertained by my quirkiness. It is a sweet thing to like yourself.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#28. As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, Where does she sparkle from?
B.J. Ward
#29. We do not require company. In varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over. Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course, the rest of the world doesn't understand.
Anneli Rufus
#30. My brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion.
William Wordsworth
#31. The romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.
Spencer Gordon
#33. [A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#34. When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape.
John O'Donohue
#35. Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude
Arthur Schopenhauer
#36. One must learn an inner solitude, wherever one may be.
Meister Eckhart
#37. Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.
Jeremy Collier
#38. 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
#39. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#40. When you are alone, bless the solitude; when you are with someone, bless the togetherness! Think of the seagull: It flies alone happily; it flies with another happily too! Solitude is a food; togetherness is a food; man needs both and he must be happy with both!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#41. I would paint a portrait which would bring the tears, had I canvas for it, and the scene should be
solitude, and the figures
solitude
and the lights and shades, each a solitude.
Emily Dickinson
#42. Our two first parents, yet the only two Of mankind, in the happy garden placed, Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, Uninterrupted joy, unrivalled love In blissful solitude.
John Milton
#43. Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
Virginia Woolf
#44. I never knew the wonders of nature, until I began to walk with nature.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#45. A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.
Michel De Montaigne
#46. Solitude that throws the honest rays of perfect euphoria;
Solitude that makes me breathe in the real me;
Solitude I call it - my abode, my self made haven;
Solitude I call it - the sanguine face of Loneliness.
Debatrayee Banerjee
#47. When female minds are embittered by age or solitude, their malignity is generally exerted in a rigorous and spiteful superintendence of domestic trifles.
Samuel Johnson
#48. In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.
William Mathews
#49. A little time separates us from those who depart - a time of tears, a time of sadness and solitude; but, that over, we go to rejoin them and to enjoy with them the society of the blessed. Oh, how sweetly the heart rests in this immortal hope!
Eugenie De Guerin
#50. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude.
Edgar Allan Poe
#51. 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
#52. It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
H.P. Lovecraft
#53. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#54. 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
#55. The world is full of noise. Might we not set ourselves to learn silence, stillness solitude?
Elisabeth Elliot
#56. Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.
Albert Camus
#57. For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry's choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.
Anais Nin
#58. Ritual of Solitude works best when you practice it at the same time every day.
Robin S. Sharma
#59. 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
#60. Why do women always look so funny alone at night? she thought. I guess you're so used to seeing them with someone.
Shirley Jackson
#62. When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
Virginia Woolf
#63. The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days ... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
Simone De Beauvoir
#65. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
Herman Melville
#66. Be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#69. How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse
#70. The soul that has been enriched by communion with God will not be dismayed by isolation but will welcome solitude. He will seek not the crowd but the closet, and emerging will never walk alone, for he has unseen companionship.
Frances J Roberts
#71. Solitude is an unmarked place beyond the borders of the map, a place where most fear to tread. It's no surprise, then, that this is where the greatest secrets and most valuable treasures are hidden.
Cristen Rodgers
#72. She felt moved to read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done so, - to hide it from view at the sound of approaching footsteps.
Kate Chopin
#74. Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#75. Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!
Stella Atrium
#77. 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
#78. One of the greatest acts of service you can do is to find someone who is secretly lonely and be a friend to them, if only for a day.
Dan Pearce
#79. When nothing in society deserves respect, we should fashion for ourselves in solitude new silent loyalties.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#81. Perhaps love is to give one's own solitude to others? For it is the very last thing we have to offer.
from "The Gift
Clarice Lispector
#82. I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.
Rudyard Kipling
#83. A person realizes inner calm and a state of rapturous peacefulness with nature whenever they stand in solitude and contemplate their existence in an infinite world filled with multiple galaxies.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#84. Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts.
Mariella Frostrup
#85. 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
#86. But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#88. Solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public ... [p. 7]
Shirley Hazzard
#89. The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#90. There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.
Sadegh Hedayat
#91. I had but three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship; three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up.
Henry David Thoreau
#93. To seek solitude like a wild animal. That is my only ambition.
Dalai Lama
#94. All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me
Eugene Ionesco
#96. I went to collect the few personal belongings which ... I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
Colette
#97. Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.
George MacDonald
#98. I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.
Susanna Clarke
#99. When it is recognized that there is nothing beyond what is seen of the mind itself, the discrimination of being and non-being ceases and, as there is thus no external world as the object of perception, nothing remains but the solitude of Reality.
Jack Kerouac
#100. When you do exactly as you're told, and you're neither the best nor the worst at any task, you can disappear in the crowd and have a small measure of solitude.
Marko Kloos
