Solitude Quotes

I've seen women-and men too, sometimes-as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna make such good matches with those who can.

~ Diana Gabaldon

As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe.-DONNE

~ Oliver Sacks

Some people search out solitude without even thinking that they need to do so--it's an innate urge with them, something that they do as a matter of course, without even thinking about the psychological benefits of being alone. These people are very fortunate, for they help themselves in a very important way on a regular basis. Other people are given solitude involuntarily--with me it came from my insecurities and my inability to fit in with others. For me, solitude was very often loneliness, and very often painful. But I know now that I made it painful because of my perspective, and I regret losing so many opportunities that being on my own opened up to me--I'll never be able to get them back. Find or make time for yourself to be with yourself. Spend time thinking about who you are and who you want to be. Examine your strengths and focus on possibilities. Find the friend inside who has accomplished a lot, and learn to love yourself on your own terms. If you can do this, you've taken a very important step towards being able to help others to learn about themselves and to be more content with life.

~ Tom Walsh

Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity.

~ Kent Nerburn

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You don’t know what it means to be betrayed! Should I explain it to you? It means to be treated like trash and your feelings get stepped on…you get hurt over and over again and in the end you are left alone!Can’t you see how much I care for you? How hard I’m trying to connect with you?When did I ever betray you? When did I ever leave you alone?

~ Yuuki Obata

Even if you are alive somewhere, the absence of the other person who used to be there beside you obliterates your presence. Everything in the room, even the stars in the sky, can disappear in a second, changing one scene for another, just like in a dream.

~ Hwang Sok-Yong

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness

~ Kate Atkinson

My aloneness had never bothered me, I hadn't even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company.

~ Linda Olsson

For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

~ Ian Fleming

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

~ Octavio Paz

My fear of loneliness is like a disease.

~ Irene Tomkinson

She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes, like fever, of contentment. I am beyond fear of solitude, she thought, I am past it. The idea thrilled her. I am beyond it and I will not sink. This submission, this triumph made her stronger. It was as if finally, after having passed through inferior stages, her life had found a form worthy of it.

~ James Salter

Solitude is heaven bliss.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When some give you advice, say 'thank you'. Then, you must seek the quietness of your spirit for a reflection and direction.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Life, time and nature are the three greatest gifts to mankind.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem.Watch me burn.Love always, Charlotte

~ Charlotte Eriksson

For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Solitude is the spirituality of the soul.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I find myself in the moment of solitude.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.

~ Michael Meade

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.

~ Paul Bowles

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

~ Flannery O'connor

There's great power in not fearing solitude. You don't allow yourself to be treated like crap because you're afraid of the alternative.

~ S. Usher Evans

There is no other company in the world I've found more pleasurable than my own. For no one else has ever been as accepting of me or as thoroughly entertained by my quirkiness. It is a sweet thing to like yourself.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

~ Wilkie Collins

The consequences of seeking popularity is not only the chronic feeling of lonliness, but a desire to hide your face from the eyes of the universe.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

~ Sylvia Plath

fall in lovewith your solitude

~ Rupi Kaur

Some of us don't stay long enough in one single place, relationship, journey or country but that does not mean we evade reality or makes us unstable. It simply means, we are not very keen to entertain ourselves, for long periods of time, with the same old same old reflections or shadows on the wall, when aware of the existence of the sun; the price for enlightenment, solitude

~ Efratcybulkiewicz

Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

~ Harold Bloom

The sound of darkness was certainly intricately linked to the sense of being alone but unrelated to this was the sound of the palpitations of men and women experiencing the sense of utter solitude. There was no doubt about it. This was a sound audible only on evenings such as this.

~ Shūsaku Endō

Doubt grew only in the fertile darkness of solitude

~ Michael R. Fletcher

What did I fear, and why? — I, to whom the night had beena more familiar facethan that of man —I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!

~ Ambrose Bierce

There is a sort of light surrounding Abel, something pure and strong radiates from him no matter where he is or what he's doing. Sometimes Cain thinks he possesses a soul without shadows. That's what people want to be close to. But if so, it's not like a child's, for a child's soul is delicate, its flickering flame needs no more than the opening of a door onto the world to blow it out. Nothing can destroy Abel's light. In his presence one never feels wicked, only foolish. That darkness which in solitude can seem so powerful, occasionally even intoxicating, seems risible in his company.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

This winter, there will be no voices, no glimpses, no arms.only the fabric of poetry, to keep me warm.

~ Sanober Khan

Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability.

~ Virginia Woolf

I have often wished in vain,' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.''That,' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us.

~ Anne Brontë

You’ve got to stop thinking of consciousness as your own. You’re only thinking for yourself when you are by yourself. As soon as you are in the presence of others, your consciousness is linked at some level to those others.

~ James Rozoff