Solitude Quotes

a person can also find solitude with others, though it is more difficult

~ Tove Jansson

We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.

~ Mark Twain

Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.

~ Charles Frazier

Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.

~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

Solitude is a temple for me.

~ M. T. Panchal

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true.

~ Sherry Turkle

Who are we without our addictions; without our media-induced hungers? So often the voices we hear echoing in our mind are not our own but that of our influencers. Isolation, while arguably going against human nature, is essential for mental and emotional health. Solitude is a detoxification of all that distorts our personality and misguides our path in life. It allows us to filter out the foreign opinions and hear our own voice—reach our authentic character—and practice fidelity to self.

~ L.m. Browning

But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-''Like lights in a storm-''In the midst of a hurricane,' she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind.

~ Virginia Woolf

We take our fetters with us, our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind, our imagination is full of them.

~ Michel De Montaigne

A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing.

~ Michel De Montaigne

True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know.

~ Anton Chekhov

Sometimes I look out the window out into the big, bright world and stare at people. Passers-by who live their ordinary lives and experience a full range of extraoridnary emotions. I stare at them for minutes, sometimes hours and then it makes me think, it makes me wonder. Are there people who are born healthy, who are born perfectly normal yet there is something wrong with them? Something nobody feels, nobody understands or questions, something that no one has ever even heard of? What if there are people among us who are capable of truly falling for someone, who are - in all biological, emotional, hormonal, chemical, philosophical senses - capable of loving someone with romantic love but no one in this wide world is capable of requiting that? Is it possible? Is it the fault of that person? Is it perhaps in the genes, the very DNA of someone? Is it perhaps destiny? And those passers-by go along happily without knowing anyone has ever asked something like this and they will probably never think about anything such because there might be only one person in this world who has to experience the feeling, the feeling that is so deeply rooted in a life alone.

~ Daniel Gyorki

I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.

~ Anna Quindlen

Company is a burden to those at home in the solitude of their souls.

~ Erika Robuck

Intimacy between people requires closeness as well as distance. It is like dancing. Sometimes we are very close, touching each other or holding each other; sometimes we move away from each other and let the space between us become an area where we can freely move.To keep the right balance between closeness and distance requires hard work, especially since the needs of the partners may be quite different at a given moment. One might desire closeness while the other wants distance. One might want to be held while the other looks for independence. A perfect balance seldom occurs, but the honest and open search for that balance can give birth to a beautiful dance, worthy to behold.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

Reading is solitude.

~ Italo Calvino

The threat of rain appears to have nothing to do with Joao Elvas's desire to be alone, and one must not forget that, strange as it may seem, some men can spend their entire life alone and enjoy solitude, especially if it is raining and their crust is hard.

~ José Saramago

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

~ Franz Kafka

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my real life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.

~ May Sarton

In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be;Where all the noises, that on peace intrude,Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee,Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.

~ John Clare

There is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd.

~ Claire North

What's so magical about solitude? In many fields, it's only when you're alone that you can engage in deliberate practice. This is the key to exceptional achievement.

~ Susan Cain

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

~ Thomas Ligotti

People who need people are threatened by people who don’t. The idea of seeking contentment alone is heretical, for society steadfastly decrees that our completeness lies in others.

~ Lionel Fisher

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

~ Rebecca Solnit

O take me from the busy crowd,I cannot bear the noise!For Nature's voice is never loud;I seek for quiet joys.The book I love is everywhere,And not in idle words;The book I love is known to all,And better lore affords.

~ John Clare

The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

The wise oyster stays in its shell.

~ Marty Rubin

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

~ Thomas Hardy

Mr. Collins was to attend them, at the request of Mr. Bennet, who was most anxious to get rid of him, and have his library to himself

~ Jane Austen

There is a charm in Solitude that cheersA feeling that the world knows nothing ofA green delight the wounded mind endearsAfter the hustling world is broken off

~ John Clare

Only a few have learned to savor the significance of solitude. Those who can glory in being alone on occasion are the saint or poet or explorer.

~ William P. Barker

Looking at the rain through my window,I can’t find an answer to this merciless solitude—The same solitude that sprouts from my eyes,A bittersweet tear which haunts me like a shadow.During evenings like this my life is about sad memories.At times I believe you’re so evil, but at end of the day you make the effort to change what my mind tells.Why don’t you turn away and let me find the love that I need?I hope you will never abandon my life and when that beautiful day comesI am going to thank you for being my lovely company.You! Eternal loneliness that poisons me-Don’t feel miserable due to these words,I only use you to drown my sorrows, to not die alone in omission.

~ Julieth Figueroa R.

my dearest agony let us be together, i am not seasoned for this solitude.

~ Nation C White

In a soulmate we find not company, but a completed solitude.

~ Robert Brault

It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.

~ Nathanael West

In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.

~ Marcel Proust

For her a day of pampering meant comic books, black liquorice, serious exercise, veggie curry and, above all, solitude.

~ Salla Simukka

Tried a lot,but can't find a companion like you my dear solitude. Let us shake our hands again.

~ Sandeep Bhat

Still, how I nearly felt. In the midst of all that looking.

~ David Markson