Solitude Quotes

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.

~ Hermann Hesse

Loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is richness of self.

~ May Sarton

Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s 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 Tillich

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms

~ Guy De Maupassant

Then stirs the feeling infinite, s

~ George Gordon Byron

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

~ Aldous Huxley

Lonely was much better than alone.

~ Toni Morrison

[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?

~ Henrik Ibsen

Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.

~ Sidney Sheldon

. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

~ Virginia Woolf

Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s 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. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.

~ Paul Tillich

Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.

~ Marty Rubin

Language 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 Tillich

If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.

~ Nina Lacour

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.

~ Peter Hessler

Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

~ David Markson

Sometimes isolation can be shared.

~ Ken Grimwood

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.

~ Marilynne Robinson

I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.

~ Michael Collins

How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself.

~ Criss Jami

I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,if there were not a friend?The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Alone you're refinding a glittering, a clarity, you're finding your distilled self. ...You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.

~ Nikki Gemmell

Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with ourselves and our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. By setting aside dependent emotions and constraining compromises, we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we can embrace it, this opportunity to adjust and refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.

~ Neel Burton

When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.

~ Gail Honeyman

Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.

~ Hannah Arendt

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

~ Ben Greenman

It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m . . . accustomed to being alone. There are times when alone is the best place to be. I enjoy my own company.

~ Sara Naveed

There must be different kinds of loneliness, or at least different degrees of loneliness, but the most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few. I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive. It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.

~ Charles M. Schulz

A box sits empty,wanting to hold and protect.Hollow tears it cries.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness

~ Joseph Conrad

...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group

~ Shirley Jackson

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.

~ Olivia Laing

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.

~ Olivia Laing

My loneliness was an important part of my own little universe, not some pathological disease that needs to be gotten [sic] rid of.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

She's one in a million. And that's why she's lonely.

~ Joyce Rachelle