Quotes and Sayings about Solitude
"Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd."
- Louis Aragon
(Related: Love, People, Solitude)
"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
- Aristotle
(Related: God, Solitude)
"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
- Francis Bacon
(Related: God, Solitude)
"The worst solitude is to have no real friendships."
- Francis Bacon
(Related: Solitude)
"Solitude is better than the society of evil persons."
- Abu Bakr
(Related: Society, Evil, Solitude)
"Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine."
- Honore de Balzac
(Related: Solitude)
"It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Time, Reality, Solitude, Years)
"Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude."
- Aphra Behn
(Related: Health, Jealousy, Nothing, Reason, Solitude)
"Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline."
- Peter Benchley
(Related: Love, Time, Discipline, Order, Solitude, Writing)
"Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, but God to man doth speak in solitude."
- John Stuart Blackie
(Related: Men, God, Man, Solitude, Wit)
"But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude."
- Harold Bloom
(Related: Society, Heart, Being, End, Solitude)
"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."
- Jorge Luis Borges
(Related: Memory, Night, Solitude, Thinking)
"Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself."
- Thomas Browne
(Related: Society, Solitude)
"Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once."
- Robert Browning
(Related: Music, Solitude)
"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
(Related: Strength, Man, Mob, Needs, Solitude, Weakness)
"This great misfortune - to be incapable of solitude."
- Jean de la Bruyere
(Related: Misfortune, Solitude)
"Solitude is the place of purification."
- Martin Buber
(Related: Solitude)
"I needed to be in the bush. There I find solitude and beauty and purity and focus. That's where my heart lies."
- Mark Burnett
(Related: Beauty, Heart, Focus, Lies, Purity, Solitude)
"Reading takes solitude and it takes focus."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Focus, Reading, Solitude)
"In solitude, where we are least alone."
- Lord Byron
(Related: Solitude)
"Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are."
- Robert Cecil
(Related: Society, Solitude)
"I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude."
- Michael Chabon
(Related: Solitude, Thinking)
"I don't mind solitude. I love talking to other people, but I do need my space."
- Iris Chang
(Related: Love, People, Mind, Solitude, Space, Talking)
"There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall."
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
(Related: Freedom, Poison, Solitude, Wine)
"Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves."
- Jeremy Collier
(Related: Being, Books, Burden, Solitude, Support)
"People who abhor solitude may abhor company almost as much."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: People, Company, May, Solitude)
"A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Solitude)
"Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity."
- Abraham Cowley
(Related: People, Knowledge, Virtue, Foolishness, Solitude, Vanity, World)
"O solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, Than reign in this horrible place."
- William Cowper
(Related: Solitude)
"I'm pretty social so it's hard for me to find solitude, but I need to have solitude to write."
- Catie Curtis
(Related: Pretty, Solitude)
"During my solitude, conflicting thoughts increased; but much exercise of soul had the effect of causing the scriptures to gain complete ascendancy over me."
- John Nelson Darby
(Related: Soul, Thoughts, Effect, Exercise, Gain, Solitude)
"The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes."
- Alberto Santos Dumont
(Related: Voice)
"The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil."
- Thomas A. Edison
(Related: Solitude, Thinking)
"Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Solitude)
"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Life, Mind, Quiet, Solitude)
"I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Maturity, Solitude, Years, Youth)
"It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me."
- Jodie Foster
(Related: War, Experience, Fear, Being, Solitude)
"In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?"
- Charles de Gaulle
(Related: History, Men, Friend, Events, Now, Satisfaction, Solitude, Temptation)
"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
- Edward Gibbon
(Related: Genius, Conversation, School, Solitude, Understanding)
"The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction."
- Allen Ginsberg
(Related: Love, Burden, Solitude, Weight, World)
"Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh."
- Allen Ginsberg
(Related: Art, Community, Effort, Living, World)
"One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Related: Society, Solitude)
"A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Related: Creation, Importance, Solitude)
"I have to say that I have no regrets about my decision to become a priest or about the major directions my ministry has taken me... I have been and am happy as a priest, and I have never been lonely... I could have used a bit more solitude."
- Andrew Greeley
(Related: Decision, Lonely, Solitude)
"I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired."
- Zane Grey
(Related: Night, Silence, Solitude)
"We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest."
- Philip Gilbert Hamerton
(Related: Society, Day, Exercise, Night, Rest, Solitude, Summer, Winter)
"Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness."
- Dag Hammarskjold
(Related: Friendship, Loneliness, Needs, Solitude, Words)
"In my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of understanding unless someone explains it to you."
- Knut Hamsun
(Related: Men, Houses, Mind, Solitude, State, Understanding)
"There's a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while."
- Tom Hanks
(Related: Being, Difference, Loneliness, Solitude)
"Silence and solitude are more distracting to me than chatter and commotion."
- Marilu Henner
(Related: Silence, Solitude)
"Solitude is independence."
- Hermann Hesse
(Related: Independence, Solitude)
"Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression."
- Henry Home
(Related: Time, Impression, Deep, Solitude, World)
"My public life is before you; and I know you will believe me when I say, that when I sit down in solitude to the labours of my profession, the only questions I ask myself are, What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?"
- Joseph Howe
(Related: Life, Profession, Public, Questions, Right, Solitude, Will)
"To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Prayer, Solitude, Thanksgiving)
"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude."
- Aldous Huxley
(Related: Religion, Mind, Solitude, Will)
"The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude."
- Washington Irving
(Related: Affliction, Duty, Open, Solitude, Sorrow)
"Half the pleasure of solitude comes from having with us some friend to whom we can say how sweet solitude is."
- William Jay
(Related: Friend, Pleasure, Solitude)
"Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it."
- Robinson Jeffers
(Related: Imagination, Mind, Solitude)
"Solitude is un-American."
- Erica Jong
(Related: Solitude)
"The thoughtful soul to solitude retires."
- Omar Khayyam
(Related: Soul, Solitude, Thoughtful)
"I didn't choose solitude."
- Klaus Kinski
(Related: Solitude)
"Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement."
- Alice Koller
(Related: Achievement, Absence, Being, Choice, Solitude)
"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
(Related: Communication, Light, Quiet, Solitude, Talking)
"Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid."
- Karl Kraus
(Related: People, Solitude)
"A solitude is the audience-chamber of God."
- Walter Savage Landor
(Related: God, Solitude)
"I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy."
- Wilfrid Laurier
(Related: Time, Nature, People, Friend, Fancy, Solitude)
"Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind."
- Giacomo Leopardi
(Related: Experience, Life, Hatred, Mankind, Philosophy, Solitude, World)
"Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character."
- James Russell Lowell
(Related: Imagination, Society, Character, Solitude)
"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."
- Thomas Mann
(Related: Beauty, Poetry, Solitude)
"Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it."
- Thomas Merton
(Related: Hope, Future, Present, Solitude, Will)
"Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty."
- Moliere
(Related: Soul, Solitude)
"Solitude begets whimsies."
- Mary Wortley Montagu
(Related: Solitude)
"Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection."
- Eugenio Montale
(Related: Success, Possibility, Communication, Reflection, Solitude, Television)
"To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude."
- Jeanne Moreau
(Related: Beach, Solitude, Sun)
"Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude."
- Frank Muir
(Related: Humor, Superiority, Jokes, Pursuit, Solitude, Wit)
"The conductor's stand is not a continent of power, but rather an island of solitude."
- Riccardo Muti
(Related: Power, Solitude)
"Alone let him constantly meditate in solitude on that which is salutary for his soul, for he who meditates in solitude attains supreme bliss."
- Guru Nanak
(Related: Soul, Solitude)
"Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not."
- Anna Neagle
(Related: Loneliness, Solitude)
"No matter how much we love our family and friends, a part of us needs the occasional moment of solitude as a plant needs water. It is the inmost core of each of us that, that part which nobody can define but which we all recognize because it never changes."
- Anna Neagle
(Related: Family, Love, Friends, Needs, Solitude, Water)
"But the delights of solitude don't only consist of dreaming. Next in enjoyment, I think, comes planning."
- Anna Neagle
(Related: Enjoyment, Planning, Solitude)
"Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost."
- Kevin Patterson
(Related: Awareness, Solitude)
"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone."
- Octavio Paz
(Related: Being, Fact, Man, Solitude)
"Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances."
- William Powell
(Related: Friends, Merriment, Mob, Quiet, Solitude)
"We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude."
- Salvatore Quasimodo
(Related: Hope, Solitude)
"From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue."
- Salvatore Quasimodo
(Related: Day, Night, Solitude)
"Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone."
- Thomas de Quincey
(Related: Men, Light, Man, May, Solitude, World)
"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."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Related: Reason, Solitude)
"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Related: Love)
"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
(Related: Solitude)
"Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
(Related: Women, Life, People, Danger, Idleness, Man, Reading, Solitude)
"Solitude vivifies; isolation kills."
- Joseph Roux
(Related: Isolation, Solitude)
"What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy."
- Salman Rushdie
(Related: Power, Solitude, Writer)
"One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: America, Solitude)
"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self."
- May Sarton
(Related: Loneliness, Poverty, Richness, Self, Solitude)
"God is absence. God is the solitude of man."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
(Related: God, Absence, Man, Solitude)
"Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
(Related: Men, Eagles, Solitude)
"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Related: Darkness, Solitude)
"Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones."
- Sydney Smith
(Related: Solitude)
"To be exempt from the Passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing Solitude."
- Richard Steele
(Related: Solitude)
"One can acquire everything in solitude except character."
- Stendhal
(Related: Character, Solitude)
"In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself."
- Laurence Sterne
(Related: Strength, Mind, Solitude)
"There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
(Related: Quiet, Solitude)
"Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other."
- Han Suyin
(Related: Love, Being, Comfort)
"He who lives in solitude may make his own laws."
- Publilius Syrus
(Related: Laws, May, Solitude)
"Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become."
- Leo Szilard
(Related: Work, Being, Friends, Memory, Solitude, Strangers, Years)
"I really do work in solitude."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Work, Solitude)
"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Society, Friendship, Solitude)
"As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Life, Laws, Poverty, Solitude, Universe, Weakness, Will)
"I have never found a companion that was 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. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Men, Lonely, Man, Solitude, Thinking, Will)
"I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Love, Solitude)
"I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Solitude)
"Language... 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
(Related: Being, Glory, Language, Pain, Word)
"Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of 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
(Related: Being, Glory, Language, Loneliness, Pain, Solitude, Word)
"Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone."
- Paul Tillich
(Related: Being, Glory, Loneliness, Pain, Solitude)
"Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it."
- Liv Tyler
(Related: Beauty, Solitude)
"Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude."
- Miguel de Unamuno
(Related: Brothers, Solitude)
"God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly."
- Paul Valery
(Related: God, Man, Solitude)
"In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death."
- Alfred Russel Wallace
(Related: Death, Life, Eternity, Solitude, Space)
"I owe my solitude to other people."
- Alan Watts
(Related: People, Solitude)
"When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign in solitude."
- William Wordsworth
(Related: Business, Solitude, World)
"Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority."
- Edward Young
(Related: Death, Life, Majority, Solitude)