Solitude Quotes

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Henry David Thoreau

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.

Thomas Gray

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

James Russell Lowell

In solitude when we are least alone.

Lord Byron

We enter the world alone we leave it alone.

James Froude

Alone alone all all alone Alone on a wide wide sea.

Hartley Coleridge

I praise the Frenchman his remark was shrewd - "How sweet how passing sweet is solitude." But grant me still a friend in my retreat Whom I may whisper - Solitude is sweet.

William Cowper

The strongest man is the one who stands most alone.

Henrik Ibsen

The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.

Omar Khayyám

I was never less alone than when by myself.

Edward Gibbon

There are three things a man must do alone. Be born die and testify.

James J. Walker

Solitary trees if they grow at all grow strong.

Winston Churchill

We never touch but at points.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the world a man lives in his own age in solitude in all ages.

W. Matthews

If from Society we learn to live Tis Solitude should teach us how to die It hath no flatterers.

Lord Byron

One can acquire everything in solitude but character.

Stendhal

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

Octavio Paz

It's a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night.

Willie Sutton

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life.

Tennessee Williams

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field than their own hearts in their closet.

Charles Caleb Colton

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Carl Sandburg

Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.

Charles Dickens

Night when words fade and things come alive when the destructive analysis of day is done and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

In solitude, you listen to sacred voice.

Lailah Gifty Akita

When your mind is quiet, when your mind is in silence, then the new arrives.

Samael Ann Weor

Part of me remained forever at Latitude 80 degrees 08 minutes South: what survived of my youth, my vanity, perhaps, and certainly my skepticism. On the other hand, I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values. All this happened four years ago. Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more peace.

Richard E. Byrd

To find is the thing.

Pablo Picasso

And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.

David James Duncan

No one can be happy in eternal solitude.

Anne Brontë

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

James Russell Lowell

There are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin.

Roman Payne

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

At first the solitudecharmed me like a prelude,but so much music wounded me.

Rainer Maria Rilke

You are at my side, dear friends, and God is everywhere. Yet ultimately we are alone, making our way home by the candle of the heart. The light is steady and sure but extends only far enough to see the next step.Many times the light seems to go out. But another light, one held by a stranger or friend, a book or a song, a blackbird or a wild flower, comes close enough so that we can see our path by its light. And in time we realize that the light we have borrowed was always our own.

Joan Borysenko

He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool-though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.

Patrick Süskind

We born alone,we all die alone.

dalin shu

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

Peter Heller

Life has ill-prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers.

Laurie R. King

CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.GRACE: -Is that an order?CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]

Tennessee Williams

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.

Michael Foley

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 Estés

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Don DeLillo

I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable.

Allen Shawn

There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself.

David Ignatow

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again. What was she seeking to salvage from the daily current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell of the dream?

Anaïs Nin

...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

Tana French

In a cool solitude of treesWhere leaves and birds a music spin,Mind that was weary is at ease,New rhythms in the soul begin.

William Kean Seymour

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

Gabriel García Márquez

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I have attained it.

Hermann Hesse

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

Edith Wharton

Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell.

Jeffrey Eugenides

...I got to love solitude - to see the Moon rise and set - I had time to watch it trace the window square across the wall in silent grace...

John Geddes

One will probably have to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman

Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.

Thomas Merton

He had to hold his body very still, very still, like some vessel about to slosh over from too much motion. Gradually he managed to get control of his breathing. His excited heart beat more steadily; the pounding of the waves inside him subsided slowly. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusky reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened, and he entered. The next performance in the theatre of his soul was beginning.

Patrick Süskind

If you are lonely, you feel separated from everybody. If you are in solitude, you feel you are in contact with the entire universe.

Siren Waroe

In solitude, you accumulate energy to spend in crowds; and in crowds, you accumulate energy to spend in solitude!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Let us not be bored

Joe Buberger

I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only - still, I left.

Mihail Drumeş

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind-- for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive-- even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing.Writing that springs from the surface of existence-- when there is no other way and deeper wells have dried up-- is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes the surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

Franz Kafka

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Solitude Quotes

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