Solitude Quotes

You must always see your loneliness as an opportunity to meet something good unexpected, something new unknown before, something interesting not happened yet!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

we used to talk all nightand do things alone togetherand i’ve begun(as a reaction to a feeling)to balancethe pleasure of lonelinessagainst the painof loving you

~ Nikki Giovanni

Loneliness isn't a disease, it is only a moment to learn something better

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness -- learn something new.

~ Carolyn G. Heilbrun

It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

~ Maggie Nelson

But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.

~ John Fowles

In the streets outside everything was still. The hour before five was the only time of day this city slept. In my earlier life, during the twelve years I had lived in Bergen I used to stay up at night as often as I could. I never reflected on this, it was just something I liked and did. It had started as a student ideal, grounded in a notion that in some way night was associated with freedom. Not in itself but as a response to the nine-to-four reality which I, and a couple of others, regarded as middle-class and conformist. We wanted to be free, we stayed up at night. Continuing with this had less to do with freedom than a growing need to be alone. This, I understood now, I shared with my father. In the house where we lived he had a whole studio apartment to himself and he spent more or less every evening there. The night was his.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

Aloneness exaggerates our emotions and sensitivity.

~ Beth Moore

my heart, sometimes singing in the afternoon, the most haunting song of solitude

~ John J. Geddes

Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.

~ Patrick Mcgrath

Prepare for a radio, for nothing is silent like the grave

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

It's bad to be unable to stand solitude.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Solitude that throws the honest rays of perfect euphoria; Solitude that makes me breathe in the real me; Solitude I call it - my abode, my self made haven; Solitude I call it - the sanguine face of Loneliness.

~ Debatrayee Banerjee

Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.

~ Eileen Myles

Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.

~ Ingmar Bergman

In truth, she disliked books. She felt a peculiar disquiet when opening the pages. She had felt it since childhood. She did not know why. Something in the act itself, the immersion, the seclusion, was disturbing. Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped. Books were like oubliettes. Her preference was for company, the tactile world, atoms.

~ Sarah Hall

Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness.

~ Orhan Pamuk

These solitary ones who are free in spirit know thatin one thing or another they must constantly put on an appearance that is different from the way they think; although they want nothing but truth and honesty, they are entangled in a web of misunderstandings. And despite their keen desire, they cannot prevent a fog of false opinions, of accommodation, of halfway concessions, of indulgent silence, of erroneous interpretation from settling on everything they do. And so a cloud of melancholy gathers around their brow, for such natures hate the necessity of appearances more than death, and their persistent bitterness about this makes them volatile and menacing. From time to time they take revenge for their violent selfconcealment, for their coerced constraint. They emerge from their caves with horrible expressions on their faces; at such times their words and deeds are explosions, and it is even possible for them to destroy themselves.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What's a rainy daywithout some deliciouscoffee-flavoured loneliness?

~ Sanober Khan

He prayed for the recovery of that inward privacy which the purpose of his vigil demanded that he seek: a clean parchment of the spirit whereon the words of a summons might be written in his solitude——if that other Immensurable Loneliness which was God stretched forth Its hand to touch his own tiny human loneliness and to mark his vocation there.

~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

~ Ernest Hemingway

This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantès, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?

~ Alexandre Dumas

Lonely' is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like 'sad' or 'strange'. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not 'lonely', more solitary than I'd hoped to be at that time.

~ David Nicholls

All human beings are alone. No other person will completely feel like we do, think like we do, act like we do. Each of us is unique, and our aloneness is the other side of our uniqueness. The question is whether we let our aloneness become loneliness or whether we allow it to lead us into solitude. Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.Letting our aloneness grow into solitude and not into loneliness is a lifelong struggle. It requires conscious choices about whom to be with, what to study, how to pray, and when we ask for counsel. But wise choices will help us to find the solitude where our hearts can grow in love.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

In the silence of night, great minds either unite or die

~ Katja Michael

You will never feel alone, if you run down the stairs of loneliness; as every solitary step becomes your companion.

~ Munia Khan

The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If solitude feels painful, it's only because we don't know how to be alone.

~ Michael Harris

Loneliness is a poison, but aloneness is a catalyst.

~ Sam Killermann

Walking alone is not difficult but when we have walked a mile worth a thousand years with someone then coming back alone is what is difficult.

~ Faraaz Kazi

I inhale loneliness like it is the sweet smell of virgin earth conquered by fiery rain drops. Within me, I'm a thousand others.

~ Faraaz Kazi

Every time a man (myself) gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. Every time, it has always been the great misfortune of wanting to show off which has lessened me in the presence of the truth. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give. There is much more strength in a man who reveals himself only when it is necessary. I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one’s secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown.

~ Albert Camus

There is a predictable interlude when the rivals suddenly come together and speak for a second of their common loneliness, thus tritely demonstrating that we really are all the same, though I can't think of any really first-rate film, play, or book that isn't unconsciously dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably different.

~ Penelope Gilliat

I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free?

~ Haruki Murakami

I seek the city because there is nothing sweeter than not being alone in your loneliness.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Nothing has the power to remind you how alone you are like walking through a conglomeration of empty skyscrapers.

~ Matthew Tysz

Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine.

~ Simon Van Booy

The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others.

~ Cesare Pavese

There was a large crowd around us, and every face in it looked happy. We had little opportunity to talk until we reached the woods, where there were no flowers and no people.

~ Sōseki Natsume

I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson