Solitude Quotes
One can acquire everything in solitude, except character.Marie Stendhal
The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.Sir Francis Bacon
To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.Deepak Chopra
Solitude is the best nurse of wisdom.Laurence Sterne
The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness, the independence of solitude.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance (essay)
A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.Gian Vincenzo Gravina
There are days when solitude, for someone my age, 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.Colette
One can acquire everything in solitude - Except character.Marie Henri Beyle
The power to bring me out of solitude - Or to push me back into it - Had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.Martha Beck, O Magazine, February 2003
Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.Robert Cecil
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.Harold Bloom, O Magazine, April 2003
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
I learned... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.Brenda Ueland
Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.Karl Kraus
Goodbye, goodbye, I hate the word. Solitude has long since turned brown and withered, sitting bitter in my mouth and heavy in my veins.R. M. Grenon
Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.Sir Thomas Browne
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 Johannes Tillich
A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.Seneca
To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.Joseph Addison
Only in solitude do we find ourselves and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.Miguel de Unanimo
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.Carl Sandburg
In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wide waste there still is a tree, And a bird in the solitude singing, Which speaks to my spirit of thee.Lord Byron, Stanzas to Augusta
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.Sir Francis Bacon
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
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.Albert Einstein
In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.Henry David Thoreau
One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict - Girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.Percival
Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.Erica Jong
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.Vladimir Nabokov
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.Stendhal
One whose chief regard is for his own mind, and for the divinity within him and the service of its goodness, will strike no poses, utter no complaints, and crave neither for solitude nor yet for a crowd. Best of all, his life will be free from continual pursuing and avoiding.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations? Book Three
Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.Han Suyin
Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.John Stuart Mill
Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition...Amelia Ba
Solitude vivifies isolation kills.Joseph Roux
But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (on the death of Decoud)
This great misfortune - To be incapable of solitude.La Bruyere
The great omission in American life is solitude... that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incinerator of the spirit.Marya Mannes
