Solitude Quotes

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

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)

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

Robert Cecil

The most dangerous aspect of present - Day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Eugenio Montale

Solitude is the beginning of all freedom.

William Orville Douglas

Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.

Han Suyin

Talents are best nurtured in solitude character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Johann von Goethe

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

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, 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 all leave it alone.

Thomas De Quincey

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal

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

Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.

William Powell

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Albert Einstein

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

A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

Gian Vincenzo Gravina

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Henry David Thoreau

One can acquire everything in solitude, except character.

Marie Stendhal

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

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

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

Carl Sandburg

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

Karl Kraus

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Sir Thomas Browne

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the real world since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Giacomo Leopardi

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

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Sir Francis Bacon

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Harold Bloom, O Magazine, April 2003

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

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 vivifies isolation kills.

Joseph Roux

In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.

Henry David Thoreau

He who lives in solitude may make his own laws.

Publilius Syrus

To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.

Joseph Addison

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Only in solitude do we find ourselves and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

Miguel de Unanimo