Solitude Quotes

He'd drop his clothes and slip into the water. The lake's top few inches, after cooking all day in the sun, would be nearly bath warm. I'd stretch out in the water, he said, and lie flat on my back, and look at the stars.

~ Michael Finkel

Near me nothing but distances.

~ Antonio Porchia

How difficult it is to find solitude in a world that constantly demands your attention.

~ Joyce Rachelle

I need to be alone. After a full day of talking, smiling, listening, showing, nodding, translating, I want to be alone. I want simply to come home, close the door, and sit in silence, gathering up the bits of myself that have come loose. I want to think, or not think. I want to rest.

~ Jamie Zeppa

If you can find no way of getting the Notes duplicated, why not try the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, who might be sympathetic (provided they do not actually read them)? I must, however, confess to a rooted dislike—perhaps you share it?—of seeking the help of Official (particularly Government) Bodies. Whenever anyone addresses me in his official capacity, I am at once filled with a desire to attack the Official Body he represents. I have every sympathy with the Irishman who, on being fined five shillings for Contempt of Court, asked the Magistrate to make it ten shillings; 'Five shillings' he explained 'do not adequately express the Contempt I have for this Court'. I am quite unable to identify myself with any organized body or cause (even if it is a body of opposition or a lost cause). I am a born blackleg. I thoroughly approve of E. M. Forster's declaration, 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country'. For me, there is no doubt that the very small word in the centre of the blank canvas at the end of 'The Artist at Work' is solitaire, not solidaire.

~ Nanavira Thera

A person realizes inner calm and a state of rapturous peacefulness with nature whenever they stand in solitude and contemplate their existence in an infinite world filled with multiple galaxies.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Genuine tranquility of the heart and perfect peace of mind, the highest blessings on earth after health, are to be found only in solitude and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion.

~ Schopenhauer

She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd.

~ Jade Chang

When you want to be alone, even few people around you will seem like a tremendous crowd to you!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?

~ Patricia Highsmith

I have always been a loner. Even as a child, when my family and friends were off attending parties I would be sequestered in my room, sketchpad in hand, stereo by my side, listening to seductive R&B. Solitude was something I took for granted. Coming from a large family I needed solitude in order to think straight and paint my way out of confusion. My parents were accepting of the fact that I kept to myself and they respected my decision even though it went against my Somali upbringing, a culture rooted in boisterousness and joie de vivre.

~ Diriye Osman

If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him. The lie was a way of buying protection.

~ Paul Auster

To imbibe so much quiet is to become the music inside it.

~ Aditya Bhaskara

I fear that moments of quietude are on the endangered list, right behind solitude.

~ Nanette L. Avery

But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

~ Virginia Woolf

Solitude is the path to visit yourself, it is the path to yourself!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Whenever one speaks of lonely people one takes too much for granted. One thinks people all know what they're dealing with. No, they do not. They've never seen a lonely person, they've simply hated him without knowing him. They've been his neighbours who've used him up, they were the voices in the next room who tempted him. They roused things up against him, getting them to make a din and drown him out. Children ganged up against him when he was a tender child, and at every stage of his growing up he grew hostile to grown-ups . They tracked him to his hiding-place like an animal of chase and throughout his long youth there was no closed season. And when he didn't allow himself to be worn out so that he got away they yelled about what came forth from him and called it ugly and were suspicious of it. And as he didn't stop they grew more obvious and gobbled up his food and breathed up his air and spat into his poverty so that he himself became disgusted at it. They brought him into disrepute as if he were a contagion and threw stones at him to speed his departure. And they were right to follow their age-old instinct: because he really was their enemy. But then when he didn't look up they had second thoughts. They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him separate himself from them for ever.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.

~ Pat Conroy

From our solitudewe shall create,forge songs ,pour in the reflectionof the stars and refresh the mindabout the silk-ridden roads that wait for them who have forgotten to feel.

~ Tara Estacaan

In solitude we can come to the realization that we are not driven together but brought together. In solitude we come to know our fellow human beings not as partners who can satisfy our deepest needs, but as brothers and sisters with whom we are called to give visibility to God's all-embracing love. In solitude we discover that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call. In solitude we indeed realize that community is not made but given.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

I've always had the sense that my life is run by other people. Except for a few years after Martin died. Those were the toughest years, I was alone with my children, I had to cope by myself. Complete poverty. You won't believe this, but nowadays when I look back, those are my happiest years.

~ Milan Kundera

In a lot of ways, living with Charlie was like having my own place, and I found myself reveling in the aloneness instead of being lonely.

~ Stephenie Meyer

She dried her tears, and they did smileTo see her cheeks’ returning glow;Nor did discern how all the whileThat full heart throbbed to overflow.With that sweet look and lively tone,And bright eye shining all the day,They could not guess, at midnight loneHow she would weep the time away.

~ Emily Brontë

Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.

~ Hermann Hesse

Being a lone wolf is sometimes better than being in a pack.

~ Puredragonwolf

Believe me, friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chain-saw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of the labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep beside his wife.

~ Matthew Neill Null

Solitude is sanity.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

In solitude, you listen to the sacred voice.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

~ Peter Ackroyd

I covet solitude and storms…and rain, with its geography of dark silence and distance

~ John J. Geddes

Things hurt more when you were alone, that was all.

~ Richard Bachman

Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.

~ Rollo May

I hate the very noise of troublous man Who did and does me all the harm he can. Free from the world I would a prisoner be And my own shadow all my company.

~ John Clare

There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I have always believed it my right to have a locked door between me and the world, and to hold the key myself. Now look at it, kicked open. The doors are off their hinges, the portals unguarded, every cover blown.

~ Mihail Sebastian

Solitude is not a port to drop anchor, but only a port to rest for a while!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Make time to be still.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I told her it takesa lot of solitude to write a poem.She told me it takes a lot of solitudeto die.

~ Ronald Baatz