Solitude Quotes

1. "Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not."
Author: Anna Neagle

2. "These values are signposts toward another way of living: simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life; balance of physical, intellectual, and spiritual life; work without pressure; space for significance and beauty; time for solitude and sharing; closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life."
Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

3. "Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god."
Author: Aristotle

4. "Any beautiful mind, full of ideas, would always express itself in the most natural, simple and straightforward way, anxious to communicate its thoughts to others (if this is at all possible) and thus relieve the solitude that he must experience in a world such as this: but conversely, intellectual poverty, confusion and wrong-headedness, clothe themselves in the most laboured expressions and obscure turns of phrase in order to conceal petty, trivial, bland or trite thoughts in difficult and pompous expressions."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

5. "Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movement through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will. As I run I displace air, and things come and go around me, and the path moves like a filmstrip beneath my feet."
Author: Audrey Niffenegger

6. "By marrying to soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin."
Author: Augustus Y. Napier

7. "He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?' but ‘So it was you all the time.' All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered...He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man."
Author: C.S. Lewis

8. "I know that to you everything has changed for the worse over the last weeks. But for me..." Elias pauses. rests his forehead into the curve of my neck. "Before you my life was nothing but wandering and solitude and death. Now with you there's possibility." He pulls back until we're looking into each other's eyes. "I'm falling inn love with you, Gabrielle. Not with the person you used to be, but you."
Author: Carrie Ryan

9. "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."
Author: Charles Bukowski

10. "The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place."
Author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés

11. "He had learned early on the trick of living separately in a crowd, private in his mind when his body could not be. But he was born a mountain-dweller, and had learned early, too, the enchantment of solitude, and the healing of quiet places."
Author: Diana Gabaldon

12. "Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
Author: Edward Gibbon

13. "Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude."
Author: Frank Muir

14. "I love hotels for their solitude and comfort, but I believe a seedy one can have as much promise as a plush one."
Author: Freema Agyeman

15. "I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

16. "He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

17. "Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank..."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

18. "It is tragic to see how the religious sentiment of the West has become so individualized that concepts such as "a contrite heart," have come to refer only to the personal experiences of guilt and willingness to do penance for it. The awareness of our impurity in thoughts, words and deeds can indeed put us in a remorseful mood and create in us the hope for a forgiving gesture. But if the catastrophical events of our days, the wars, mass murders, unbridled violence, crowded prisons, torture chambers, the hunger and the illness of millions of people and he unnamable misery of a major part of the human race is safely kept outside the solitude of our hearts, our contrition remains no more than a pious emotion."
Author: Henri J.M. Nouwen

19. "Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger."
Author: Henri Nouwen

20. "I love to be alone. I never found the companion that is so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

21. "I was alone in that room. Of course, there were bodies all around, but they were all dead. They were dead when I got there. Well, most of them were dead. The last few I had to strangle so I could enjoy some solitude."
Author: Jarod Kintz

22. "I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity."
Author: Jean Paul Sartre

23. "Nothing is therefore more dangerous than solitude. Our imagination, forced by its very nature to unfold, nourished by the fantastic visions of poetry, gives shape to a whole order of creatures of which we are the lowliest, and everything around us seems to be more glorious, everyone else more perfect...If, on the other hand, we can make up our minds to go about our daily tasks, resigned to our feelings, and hardships, we often find that, in spite of our meanderings and procrastinations, we have gone farther than quite a few others have gone with their sails unfurled and steering gear functioning."
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

24. "No place for illusions here. The beat doesn't stop solitude, it doesn't cure pain, you can't telephone it - it's simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story."
Author: John Berger

25. "Solitude sometimes is best society."
Author: John Milton

26. "During my solitude, conflicting thoughts increased; but much exercise of soul had the effect of causing the scriptures to gain complete ascendancy over me."
Author: John Nelson Darby

27. "Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the samethoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

28. "Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core"
Author: Joseph Conrad

29. "Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it's a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it's fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that's about it. I don't even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn't say whether I liked the book or not."
Author: Joshua Foer

30. "I deserted the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength."
Author: Kahlil Gibran

31. "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible."
Author: Pablo Picasso

32. "I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in."
Author: Pat Conroy

33. "God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly."
Author: Paul Valery

34. "A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

35. "I was adrift, tugged and pulled by the gravity of solitude, a festering hunger driving me like a relentless martinet"
Author: Peter Tieryas

36. "A habit of solitude in early childhood is not easily broken. Indeed, it may prove lifelong."
Author: Philippa Pearce

37. "It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

38. "It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

39. "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."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

40. "It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check."
Author: Russell Banks

41. "As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude."
Author: Sigmund Freud

42. "Day by day, the constant solitude drove him deeper inside himself, with only his thoughts for companions. Soon he might lose the capacity for social intercourse altogether. The possibility of such an eventuality brought him to his feet"
Author: Sondra Allan Carr

43. "I'm not saying abolish group work - I think there's a time and a place for people to come together and exchange ideas, but let's restore the respect we once had for solitude. And we need to be much more mindful of the way we come together."
Author: Susan Cain

44. "La présence des autres affadit le monde. La solitude est cette conquête qui vous rend jouissance des choses."
Author: Sylvain Tesson

45. "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."
Author: Thomas Mann

46. "Red like bloodWhite like boneRed like solitudeWhite like silenceRed like the beastly instinctWhite like a god's heartRed like thawing hatredWhite like a frozen, pained cryRed like the night's hungry shadowsLike a sigh piercing the moonit shines white and shatters red"
Author: Tite Kubo

47. "It all fell away then – the control, the independence . . . everything. She had known it would never be easy to findsolitude . . . to find herself. Not in this city, where appearances were everything; where emptiness filled luxurious landscapes till there was nothing but hollow splendor…She hated the pretense.More than hatred, she was frightened of it."
Author: Umair Naeem

48. "Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way, different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek had not had it. His father had indeed been utterly reliable and affectionate. Whatever Shevek was and whatever he did, Palat approved and was loyal. But Palat had not had this curse of difference. He was like the others, like all the others to whom community came so easy. He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

49. "Solitude was corrupting me."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

50. "But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!' when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin."
Author: Zoë Heller

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