Solitude Quotes by Eugene Ionesco, James Anthony Froude, Caroline Knapp, James Salter, Gertrude Stein, Rainer Maria Rilke and many others.
On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day’s conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: ‘Large coffee with milk, please.
When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.
[Saint Anthony] said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.
But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.
St. John of the Cross points out that the divine music can best be heard in solitude and silence. The sonorous music is not a physical sound that vibrates the eardrum but something transcending the senses. Physical solitude and silence remove the distracting noises that prevent us from hearing on deeper levels.
The first great thing is to find yourself and for that you need solitude and contemplation – at least sometimes. I can tell you deliverance will not come from the rushing noisy centers of civilization. It will come from the lonely places.
Imagination flourishes best in solitude.
Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yard-stick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.
Every so often a disappearance is in order. A vanishing. A checking out. An indeterminate period of unavailability. Each person, each sane person, maintains a refuge, or series of refuges, for this purpose. A place, or places, where they can, figuratively if not literally, suspend their membership in the human race.
Only the bad man is alone.
Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one.
Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.
Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
Solitude may rust your words.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.
It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
I love the solitude of being on a plane and finally getting to read an entire book and being left alone.
We must understand the connection between inner solitude and inner silence; they are inseparable. All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.
Transgression is a quest for solitude
Nobody with me at sea but myself.
We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasures on earth and in eternity. Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. The need for solitude and quietness was never greater than it is today.
The use of knowledge in our sex (beside the amusement of solitude) is to moderate the passions and learn to be contented with a small expense, which are the certain effects of a studious life and, it may be, preferable even to that fame which men have engrossed to themselves and will not suffer us to share.
That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.
Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.
There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude. You pursue solitude, I think. But loneliness is a completely different isolating thing.
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
No one can endure his own solitude.
For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.
Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.
In solitude all great things are born.
There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.
Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.
The secret of solitude is that there is no solitude.
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.
The good and the wise lead quiet lives.
All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
Solitude is unquenched ego.
In solitude, you accumulate energy to spend in crowds; and in crowds, you accumulate energy to spend in solitude!
Blessed are those who do not fear solitude, who are not afraid of their own company, who are not always desperately looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with, something to judge.
Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.
I myself am best
When least in company.
When least in company.
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.
To think to be wise alone is a very great folly.
The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.
How great are the advantages of solitude! How sublime is the silence of nature’s ever-active energies! There is something in the very name of wilderness, which charms the ear, and soothes the spirit of man. There is religion in it.
There is much to be said for solitude.
I feel most real when alone, even most alive when alone. Better to say that the liveliness of companionship and the liveliness of solitude differ, and the latter is never as exhausting as the former.
Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.
Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.
It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky… a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
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.
Today’s competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one’s social life, one’s solitude, one’s sleep, one’s sleeplessness.
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible… In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.
Solitude is very restorative for me, especially because I spend so much time around other people and performing to people.
It’s clear to me that anyone, anywhere, can experience loneliness, isolation, solitude, and estrangement; and most people probably do encounter these things at some point in their lives.
For me, there’s nothing better than getting immersed in a sprawling, epic, multi-generational family saga, and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most sprawling, epic, and multi-generational of them all.
Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.
Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.
If I’m going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I’ve got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don’t turn on music or the TV unless I really need to.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
I love my solitude, and I would love it still more if I had more of it.
What others regard as retreat from them or rejection of them is not those things at all but instead a breeding ground for greater friendship, a culture for deeper involvement, eventually, with them.
Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude.
What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.
It is very easy to love alone.
But I think there’s something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I’m very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.
Any man who is really a man must learn to be alone in the midst of others, to think alone for others, and, if necessary, against others.
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
I live now in solitude and am able to use my time reflecting on the past and preparing for death. I cannot put away the thought of the Indians and in my ambition I fly to the Rockies.
The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.
Apply yourself to solitude. One who is given to solitude knows things as they really are.
Retire at various times into the solitude of your own heart, even while outwardly engaged in discussions or transactions with others, and talk to God.
See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It’s really not about other people’s needs and assumptions. I’m not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.
Happiness must be shared. Selfishness it its enemy; to make another happy is to be happy one’s self. It is quiet, most easily won in moments of solitude and reflection. It comes from within.
With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
a basic “must” for every writer: A simple solitude-physical & mental.
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
The value of solitude – one of its values – is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.
The best would be to have friends who came and went away; but if I had to choose between their never coming or never going away, I think I would choose that they do not come.
Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet except the beating of your heart.
The bitter pinecone may be eaten, The mist on high give nourishment. The whole world takes to go-and-getting; My way alone is difficult.
Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
This is to be along; this, this is solitude!
In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. Tibullus by all means use sometimes to be alone.
Those moments of solitude and exhibiting a mental breakdown, and how you do that physically and without it being too obvious, but being relatively settled but relatively intense. There are some intense moments in there that sort of pepper his breakdown.
Hermits have no peer pressure.
It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you.
I place solitude in a frame on my desk and call it, the one I love.
What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!
When I was going into one of my first meditation retreats, I asked my father, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, for some advice. He said, “How you act when you’re alone affects the rest of your life.” Even in solitude, the ruler engages in virtue.
No one can be happy in eternal solitude.
He clings to his solitude, to his affected indifference and his grown-up ways, but it’s just an act, so as never, never to show his real feelings.
I am thinking of you in my sleepless solitude tonight.
Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of intelligence; hence, in man, the possibilities of perdition
We walk alone in the world.
It is in lonely solitude that God delivers His best thoughts, and the mind needs to be still and quiet to receive them.
Wilderness has been characterized as barren and unproductive; little can be grown in its sand and rock. But the crops of wilderness have always been its spiritual values – silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude – able to be harvested by any traveler who visits.
Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.
Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, deathlike solitude.
I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.
It takes isolation and solitude for me to write.
I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.
I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
There’s something about the darkness that I find unavoidably intoxicating. The knowledge that other people are sleeping and, therefore, unavailable to ruin my solitude, makes me more peaceful than I am during the day.
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.
I feel strongly that the God we meet in solitude is always the God who calls us to community.
Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
Aloneness is obviously not isolation, and it is not uniqueness. To be unique is merely to be exceptional in some way, whereas to be completely alone demands extraordinary sensitivity, intelligence, understanding.
There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.
I really do work in solitude.
The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.
It’s a privilege to have kids and not live your life in solitude. But we live in a child-hating culture.
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.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so I made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
He that fancies such a sufficiency in himself that he can live without all the world is greatly mistaken; but he that imagines himself so necessary that other people cannot live without him is a great deal more mistaken.
When I’m writing solitude feels very good. But when I’m not writing it feels lonely… Having a big family solves that problem.
This great misfortune, to be incapable of solitude.
I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it… painting is one’s private life.
When I finished reading ‘100 Years of Solitude,’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I got really sad. I thought, ‘This will never happen for me, for the first time, ever again.’ Then I opened ‘Beauty Is a Wound.’ It’s a completely different story and writing style, but it has a similar place in my heart now.
Marriage is the only thing that affords a woman the pleasure of company and the perfect sensation of solitude at the same time.
alone, adj. In bad company.
Solitude is the one place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society that will otherwise relentlessly mold us. Solitude requires relentless perseverance.
The world is full of noise. Might we not set ourselves to learn silence, stillness solitude?
Theres a difference between solitude and loneliness
Women need a space to be creative — creativity thrives in solitude.
Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
Everyone is lonely sometimes, even married people. But most single women (as well as women with spouses) actually enjoy their solitude.
One is inspired only in solitude.
Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.
The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved.
My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.
I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking “This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi.” What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.
Nothing is more dangerous than solitude.
Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotismat solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation.
Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
When you have a lot of solitude, any living thing becomes a companion.
Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.
I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can’t picture.
Nature has a language of its own, or maybe those who have lived long in solitude read in it their own unconscious inner feelings and mysterious foreknowledge.
Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.
Spiritual superiority [consists in] deep dedication … in the form of the most rigorous training, as commitment, resistance, solitude, and love.
When you hear a solo piano, there’s a solitude about just one instrument playing. It can be beautiful; it can be sad.
A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert… gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture?
Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
This solitude opressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.
Worthy books
Are not companions – they are solitudes:
We lose ourselves in them and all our cares.
Are not companions – they are solitudes:
We lose ourselves in them and all our cares.
Make your judgment trustworthy by trusting it. Cultivate regular periods of silence and meditation. The best time to build judgment is in solitude, when you can think out things for yourself without the probability of interruption.
You grow your best thoughts in silence, solitude, and meditation. When you relax and think deeply, you are giving your inmost powers their best opportunity to disclose themselves.
The price for independence is often isolation and solitude.
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?
Delight in meditation and solitude. Compose yourself, be happy. You are a seeker.
All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don’t interest me.
Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.
Sorrow and solitude, these are the precious things/ And the only words that are worth remembering.
I think art, the discipline of creating, really does require tremendous solitude. But the whole creative process can seal your life to such an extent that while you’re creating, you feel very self-sufficient. I’ve certainly experienced that.
Life grows darker as we go on, till only one pure light is left shining on it; and that is faith. Old age, like solitude and sorrow, has its revelations.
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Often, marriage was solitude, with company.
I’ve always loved the woods, and I’ve always loved gardening and a lot of solitude and quiet.
If you aren’t constantly astonished at God’s grace in your solitude, there’s no way it can happen in public.
May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude.
I like people. I like watching them. It’s just that I’d prefer to do it from a mile away using very powerful binoculars.
Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences
Whoever gives himself up to solitude, Ah! he is soon alone.
Remember what peace there may be in silence.
In his lonely solitude, the solitary man feeds upon himself; in the thronging multitude, the many feed upon him. Now choose.
How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible.
Reading takes solitude and it takes focus.
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverance for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
The cure for too much to do is solitude and silence.
In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence
It is in solitude that the works of hand, heart and mind are always conceived, and in solitude that individuality must be affirmed.
My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.
The secret prayer chamber is a bloody battleground. Here violent and decisive battles are fought out. Here the fate of souls for time and eternity is determined, in quietude and solitude.
How can we have our privacy? How can we have our independence now in these times with these cameras? Because I think privacy and our solitude is really important.
A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the “solitary situation“, the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.
Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.
Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
The strong grows in solitude where the weak withers away.
No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
I’m pretty social so it’s hard for me to find solitude, but I need to have solitude to write.
A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
We enter into solitude first of all to meet our Lord and to be with him and him alone. Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a singleminded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature.
He has learned that God uses solitude to teach us how to live with other people.
People who take the time to be alone usually have depth, originality, and quiet reserve.
Alone, I am drunk on my thoughts; in company, I am sober again.
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
We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.
Most critics don’t realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone else. Some people would be better off alone, but they feel they’ve got to get hold of someone to prove they’re worthwhile.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
Solitude is the mother of anxieties.
Never be afraid to sit a while and think.
Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. [It allows you to] be the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark of your own streams and oceans; [to] explore your own higher latitudes; [to] be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
There is always something left to love.
Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
Something of the hermit’s temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.
We never touch but at points.
Although a man may lose a sense of his own importance when he is a mere unit among a busy throng, all utterly regardless of him, it by no means follows that he can dispossess himself, with equal facility, of a very strong sense of the importance and magnitude of his cares.
Half the pleasure of solitude comes from having with us some friend to whom we can say how sweet solitude is.
Solitude is better than the society of evil persons.
Happiness is not to be sought in solitude or in busy centers. It is in the Self.
I prize the privilege of being alone.
If from society we learn to live, solitude should teach us how to die.
I prefer to be left alone with my books.
It’s hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
I had but three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship; three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up.
On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day’s conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: ‘Large coffee with milk, please.’
I implore those who love me to love my solitude.
I had as lief have been myself alone.
I cannot endure the horror, the evil, which comes to self in solitude.
The rigors of creativity – the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude – do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn’t for everyone.
We’ve known about the transcendent power of solitude for centuries; it’s only recently that we’ve forgotten it.
Solitude is independence.
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.
Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
No person loving or admiring himself is alone.
A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.
People who abhor solitude may abhor company almost as much.
I reflected much on that vain desire, which had pursued me for so many years, of being in solitude in order to be a Christian. I have now, thought I, solitude enough; but am I therefore the nearer being a Christian? Not if Jesus Christ be the model of Christianity.
Solitude does not consist in living alone; it consists in living with others, with people who take no interest in you.
You probably can’t get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there’s a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
Maybe solitude is best had in the midst of multitudes.
…loneliness is not a function of solitude.
There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.
I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I’ve refused to vanquish.
In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.
I owe my solitude to other people.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.
The men who have had the most to give to their fellow men are those who have enriched their minds and hearts in solitude. It is a poor education that does not fit a man to be alone with himself.
Nothing is achieved without solitude.
Solitude is the strength of being alone. It’s where we become our best company.
If you would live innocently, seek solitude.
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
No matter who weaves in and out of your life, regardless of the quality of those deep friendships and familyships, I’m the only common denominator at this point who’s been with me the whole time. And there’s this sense of trying to make sense of that ultimate solitude. It’s not a negative or even a positive. It’s just a fact.
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.
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Solitude, the sly enemy that doth separate a man from well-doing.
I don’t know about birds nor do I know the history of fire. But I believe that my solitude should have wings
Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.
It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush… It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.
A person who finds silence and solitude boring is a person who is himself boring, empty of anything worth consideration.
We must get to the place of real solitude with Christ. He is our mountain-height and our sea-calm.
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
I was never less alone than when by myself.
Where should the scholar live? In solitude, or in society? in the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark, gray town where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man?
To be exempt from the Passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing Solitude.
Hours of solitude, hours of creation, hours of meditation. Solitude and meditation gave me an awareness, a perspective which I have never lost: that of solidarity with the rest of mankind.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Love is nothing but the fear of mortal man at the thought of solitude.
I love nature, I really do. I love the great outdoors, I love the concept of quiet, peaceful solitude shared only with the loons calling to each other across the water, and Bambi and Thumper in the forest, and a simple tent between me and the starry, starry sky.
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
I love all waste and solitary places.
Someone who’s awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.
In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.
I like solitude. I like the anomalous life. I like a quiet life.
The cat makes himself the companion of your hours of solitude, melancholy and toil.
In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find ‘the ultimate questioner’ – that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question.
The difference between friends and pets is that friends we allow into our company, pets we allow into our solitude.
To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.
Next to a shot of some good, habit-forming narcotic, there is nothing like travelling alone as a ‘builder-upper.
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.
Word I was in my life alone, / Word I had no one left but God.
But solitude is sadness.’ ‘Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy lies heart-break.
Solitude. It is way underrated in our world of writing. We stay busy. We act busy. We thrive on busy. The truth is there is a lot of beauty that lives in the solitude. Quiet is not the enemy. Quiet is necessary for brains to not self-destruct.
Even if loving meant leaving, or solitude, or sorrow, love was worth every penny of its price.
Usually, we think that “good” loneliness is what we call “solitude,” the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why.
The loner may be respected, but he is always resented by his colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them, when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself.
Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude.
True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.
Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.
