Solitude Quotes

There's something very enticing about an empty bench under a tree. And if it's facing a river, that's the bench for me.

~ Joyce Rachelle

I know I can't own a hilltop, a meadow, or a mountainside. But keeping it a secret somehow makes it mine.

~ Joyce Rachelle

The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me—all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but it had not in me.

~ Rebecca Solnit

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. 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 thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature...scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the same of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere support of a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary...

~ John Stuart Mills

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.

~ Estwick Evans

But the most dangerous thing that camp had taught me was the awful lesson of country living: out there, in the open, in the quiet, all the emptiness pressed itself up against you, pawed at the very center of your heart, convinced you to make friends with loneliness.

~ Kaitlyn Greenidge

I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.

~ Henry David Thoreau

I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly

~ Henry David Thoreau

The endless ocean was his sole companion , and on some deeply sentimental level, it seemed sufficient. Almost apt. He aligned himself with Thoreau and Tolstoy, he felt like their peers. The kinship with nature devoted humans to a mythical state, a heightened persona beyond the reach of mere mortals. At least that was what he told himself on the lonely nights when insomnia played on his fears and the howling wind pierced through his soul.

~ Adelheid Manefeldt

Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude And fled to the silence of sweet solitude. Where the flower in green darkness buds, blossoms, and fades, Unseen of all shepherds and flower-loving maids— The hermit bees find them but once and away. There I'll bury alive and in silence decay.

~ John Clare

O lead me onward to the loneliest shade, The darkest place that quiet ever made, Where kingcups grow most beauteous to behold And shut up green and open into gold.

~ John Clare

I never knew the wonders of nature, until I began to walk with nature.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.

~ A.s. Byatt

This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Michael wasn't on the pool deck, which was hard for me. None of my old Coral Springs teammates were around. Still, that old plane of cement felt like home. I folded my clothes and put them on the bench. I placed my water bottle under my starting block, and I dove in. Once again, I felt that ultimate state of transition, my feet no longer on the ground, my hands not yet in the water.

~ Dara Torres

If you want inner peace, find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.

~ Stewart L. Udall

I find it quite incredible how much peace and quiet a person actually needs in order to devote himself entirely to his thoughts.

~ Oddný Eir

You ought to pause and enjoy the peace in the moment.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.

~ Virginia Woolf

She imagined herself drowning along the tides of Sumendu Lake, down own into the depths of solemn solitude, splashing into the serenity of forever silence.

~ Ashmita Acharya

What if you are just destined to get hurt, to be helplessly stuck in a point of time you no longer want to be? Maybe life is all about trying to get up while you fall a little bit deeper in the pits of hell, each time you try not to...

~ Sanhita Baruah

You are alone,So alone,You speak back to silence.People call it loneliness,You call it solitude,Different words,Meaning the same pain.

~ Jenim Dibie

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

~ Criss Jami

Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude.

~ Milan Kundera

Marriage is the ultimate solitude with minimal privacy.

~ Nelson Rodrigues

The sacredness of solitude is spiritualty

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Thank God for the solitude of the Sabbath.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I sing a beautiful song quietly in my heart.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Who hears music, feels his solitudePeopled at once.

~ Robert Browning

And stay, my dearstay...forever, as my quiet song,in my lilac dawn.

~ Sanober Khan

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

~ Kahlil Gibran

The holiest of all holidays are thoseKept by ourselves in silence and apart,The secret anniversaries of the heart.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

my dear,we are all made of water. it's okay to rage. sometimes it's okay to rest. to recede.

~ Sanober Khan

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

~ Margaret Atwood

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

~ Criss Jami

It is so easy at times for a lonely individual to begin fantasizing about what the people outside are saying about him and, in result, irrationally and fearfully, and sometimes angrily, fancy himself a villain.

~ Criss Jami

One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. |Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft shushing of the ship’s systems, like a mechanical sea

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Divinity dwells in thee. To activate the power, you must connect with the spirit daily.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Live each day with ecstatic serenity

~ Lailah Gifty Akita