Top 97 Quotes About Solitude And Loneliness
#1. There's a difference between solitude and loneliness.
Maggie Smith
#2. Solitude and loneliness are two separate things. One you choose out of wisdom, the other out of necessity.
-Mark Miller
Mark Miller
#3. 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
#4. My aloneness had never bothered me; I hadn't even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company.
Linda Olsson
#6. 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
#7. Aloneness exaggerates our emotions and sensitivity.
Beth Moore
#8. I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#9. Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich
#10. The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.
Marya Mannes
#11. If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#12. My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that's worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to?
Charlotte Eriksson
#13. She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
#14. Everybody in the world wants to be understood and to have others appreciate them.
Being different is scary. Solitude is pain and loneliness.
Mizuki Nomura
#15. In a society where people are obsessed with personal space, dogs have come to serve as welcome, neo-human mediators of loneliness and solitude.
Okey Ndibe
#16. It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#17. I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.
Ben Greenman
#18. 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
#19. With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness
learn something new.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
#20. She's one in a million. And that's why she's lonely.
Joyce Rachelle
#21. There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#22. By Fortune's adverse buffets overborne
To solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn,
And not in utter loneliness to live,
Myself at last did to the Devil give!
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#23. Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.
Mike Norton
#24. Poems can get
sleepless too
and become
the loneliest thing
in the universe.
Sanober Khan
#25. ...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group
Shirley Jackson
#26. I know exactly what my future looks like and I'm okay with it. I'm happy to live in solitude. I'm not afraid of spending the rest of my life in the company of my own person. I do not afraid loneliness.
Tahereh Mafi
#27. Loneliness is only an opportunity to cut adrift and find yourself. In solitude you are least alone.
Bruce Lee
#28. Be silent in that solitude Which is not loneliness - for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee - and their will Shall then overshadow thee: be still.
Edgar Allan Poe
#29. I'm still lonely and it's a glorification of something I'm not finished with. I don't want to be distracted from my work by other people, but the absence of it all distracts me from my work and that's why I run towards the city, to get a little glimpse of it.
Charlotte Eriksson
#30. Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.
Neel Burton
#31. Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of complete solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. Because of this the most acute form of suffering for human beings is loneliness.
Chris Hedges
#32. There was a large crowd around us, and every face in it looked happy. We had little opportunity to talk until we reached the woods, where there were no flowers and no people.
Soseki Natsume
#33. I've seen women-and men too, sometimes-as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna make such good matches with those who can.
Diana Gabaldon
#34. There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.
John O'Donohue
#35. But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.
John Fowles
#36. Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms
Guy De Maupassant
#37. The heart which has no agenda but God's is the heart at leisure from itself. Its emptiness is filled with the Love of God. Its solitude can be turned into prayer.
Elisabeth Elliot
#38. The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.
Rohinton Mistry
#39. People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can't live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.
Karl Lagerfeld
#40. 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
#41. I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends.
Vincent Van Gogh
#42. Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.
Haruki Murakami
#43. The association between failure, loneliness, and solitude is so strong in our culture that people often find it difficult to believe that there are some who like being by themselves.
Suzanne Gordon
#44. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.
Olivia Laing
#45. To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#46. Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.
Anthony Marais
#47. Still, he felt lonely and fell into the trap of pretending to prefer being alone, thus leading to further loneliness in a vicious circle of solitude that young men of a certain temperament build for themselves and then inhabit. But
E.E. Knight
#48. It's clear to me that anyone, anywhere, can experience loneliness, isolation, solitude, and estrangement; and most people probably do encounter these things at some point in their lives.
Brendan Myers
#49. Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing.
Fred Rogers
#50. Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man's being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich
#51. Until you experience real loneliness, you shall never know what real loneliness is. So many people feel miserable and lonely just because they ignore their inner man, create a gap between themselves and their inner man, and neglect their true self!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#52. Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in Playboy and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love.
Gay Talese
#53. But if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.
Sherry Turkle
#54. Solitude is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it.
Deepak Chopra
#55. I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit - - - - - - - - - - - and wanted to shoot myself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#56. The corner doesn't mind listening to the stupid things I say;
Sometimes it's the only one keeping me from running away.
And the corner never tells me things I'd rather never know;
We became the best of friends long, long, long ago.
Margo T. Rose
#57. Loneliness is imposed by society, it kills you and solitude
is self inflicted. I enjoy my solitude
Dixy Gandhi
#58. A lonesome town, though. He who had grown up alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During the past several months he had been careful, when he had no engagement for the evening, to hurry to one of his clubs and find someone. Oh there was a loneliness here
F Scott Fitzgerald
#59. I like to make a distinction between solitude and being alone. Alone signifies loneliness, whereas solitude means really connecting with yourself.
Deepak Chopra
#60. there is a difference between
loneliness and solitude,
one will empty you and
one will fill you.
you have the power to choose.
AVA.
#61. I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.
Marilynne Robinson
#62. I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,
if there were not a friend?
The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#63. Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
Jonathan Franzen
#64. What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?
Henrik Ibsen
#65. 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
#66. Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.
Neel Burton
#67. For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.
Isabelle Eberhardt
#68. 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
#69. To a heart formed for friendship and affection the charms of solitude are very short-lived.
Fanny Burney
#70. Alone you're refinding a glittering, a clarity, you're finding your distilled self ... You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.
Nikki Gemmell
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. [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
#74. 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
#75. Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
May Sarton
#76. And for this you must have quiet and solitude. But society does not allow you to have them. You must be with people, outwardly active at all costs. If you are alone you are considered antisocial or peculiar, or you are afraid of your own loneliness.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#77. Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.
Pearl Cleage
#78. Not loneliness, but solitude. Not suffering, but endurance, the discovery of grim kinship with the rocks and sky. And the finding here of a harsh peace that would transcend bodily discomfort, a healing instead of the wounds of the soul.
Diana Gabaldon
#79. Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness.
Orhan Pamuk
#80. My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about.
Dwight Yoakam
#83. One ought to love society, if he wishes to enjoy solitude. It is a social nature that solitude works upon with the most various power. If one is misanthropic, and betakes himself to loneliness that he may get away from hateful things, solitude is a silent emptiness to him.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#84. Loneliness is just space expanding around you. Trust uncertainty. Sadness is life holding you in its hands and changing you. Make solitude your home.
Rachel Corbett
#85. It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching.
Lauren Groff
#86. Remember that although the distinction can be difficult to draw, loneliness and solitude are different.
Gretchen Rubin
#87. we used to talk all night
and do things alone together
and i've begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you
Nikki Giovanni
#88. You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.
Henry David Thoreau
#89. She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.
Albert Camus
#90. The very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid.
Brad Mehldau
#91. 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
#92. if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude.
Sherry Turkle
#93. Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
Jodi Picoult
#94. Although he had through the memories learned about the pain of loss and loneliness, now he gained too, an understanding of solitude and its joy.
Lois Lowry
#95. Loneliness is painful; Solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community ...
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#96. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
Henry David Thoreau
#97. Loneliness is a drug, a narcotic; it grows through veins, through nerves and muscles; it assumes some right of possession over your body and mind; it feeds itself, and creates its own requirement. Loneliness and solitude are walls.
R.J. Ellory
