Solitude Quotes

We exist in the world of books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

~ Maggie Nelson

Nature, take my breath with you; renew it with the wild breeze and fill my being up with so much soul, ego learns to fade away.

~ Nikki Rowe

Ironically, the only way to see clearly is to stand at a distance. You might be focused, but that doesn't mean you are seeing correctly. Sometimes, you have you to grab the camera from the idiot taking all the shots in your life because they don't realize the lens is dirty.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I deserted the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength.

~ Kahlil Gibran

He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.

~ Geraldine Brooks

It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.

~ Bill Bryson

Gratitude does not mean the absence of solitude, but the presence of a positive attitude in spite of.

~ Gift Gugu Mona

A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The solitary speaks.One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a wilderness we walk aloneHowever well-companioned

~ Stephen Vincent Benét

i will forever be collidingwith a billion unnamedundiscovered stars, each of uson our own orbital paths.

~ Sanober Khan

Exile from society allows person to disengage from meaningless activities and develop conscious awareness. A person’s courageous struggle to eliminate the trepidation of social exile produces insights into what it means to be human. We can displace emotional disquiet by living a heightened state of existence. How a person’s resolves the tremendous anxiety and dizziness that impetus comes from contemplating the inevitability of death, human freedom of choice, the moral responsibilities attendant to living in a selected manner, existential isolation, and the possibility of nothingness establishes a governing philosophical framework. A person must not rue ouster from society because release from moral and societal constraints spurs learning and advanced consciousness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

~ Wendell Berry

The quiet wasn't so lonely if you listened to how much sound was hidden in silence.

~ Rae Mariz

So they gave me love in form of poison and tiny little pills, programming my emotions, teaching me how to feel. To act correct and talk correct and answer without knowing the question, because that, my dear, is how you get love. Yes that, dear youth, is how you'll be loved. I tried to medicate my own fucked up little mind with chemicals and adrenaline, tasting sweeter every night, shaking louder every time. Sitting wide awake in bed until the world disappears, writing poetry to concentrate on something real while waiting for the love to arrive.I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.)

~ Charlotte Eriksson

If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We become more devoted to pleasing other people than establishing a relationship with ourselves. We believe we are what we have and what we do and we believe we are what other people think we are. Ego is in many ways the primary cause of most of our misconception and woe.

~ Evan Sutter

At one point in your life you have to decide whether you want to become a sachem or a solitary.

~ Akilnathan Logeswaran

I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

~ Peter Straub

For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: Life--real life--was just a solitude waiting to be transfigured. If Phillip was with her, the solitude she needed would be shattered, and along with it whatever wondrous thing might have come her way if she had been alone.

~ Kevin Brockmeier

Only in a state of solitude, when you willingly stay face to face with God, can He help you to open yourself, and show the impurities preventing you from moving forward and help you to identify your unique gift, life mission and destination

~ Sunday Adelaja

There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.

~ Fernando Pessoa

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way--and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of 'old people' and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end.

~ Irène Némirovsky

What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It's scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you're going to stumble upon a secret place where everyone will jump out at you. And then, when you are the very last seeker, you start to wonder if you're the only person in the world. If the hiding place somehow sucked up the players and the last one has to decide to run away or get sucked up, too.

~ Suzanne Palmieri

I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource.

~ John Keats

The earth is grounding while the mountains, curvaceous and sweeping, offer a blanket of refuge. Their woods are abounding in camouflage as their leaves sway about in continuous, florid dance. There is an air of invulnerability that is exclusive to the woods, which is why she’s most happy among them. She doesn’t mind beasts as they are preferable to humans and much less threatening; beasts, you see, although dangerous, are incapable of the enmity that permeates beyond the shade of the woods.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

~ Aldous Huxley

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

~ Henry David Thoreau

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occa

~ Albert Camus

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.

~ Eve Ensler

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

~ Virginia Woolf

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I was a man who thrived on solitude, without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude, but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.

~ Charles Bukowski

Solitude sometimes is best society.

~ John Milton