Solitude Quotes

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

Solitude is the best nurse of wisdom.

Laurence Sterne

Solitude vivifies isolation kills.

Joseph Roux

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

James Russell Lowell

He who lives in solitude may make his own laws.

Publilius Syrus

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

Sir Thomas Browne

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

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

Rainer Maria Rilke

One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict - Girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.

Percival

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

Robert Cecil

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

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

Harold Bloom, O Magazine, April 2003

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