Solitude Quotes

...solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone.

~ Paul Gauguin

Everybody in the world wants to be understood and to have others appreciate them.Being different is scary. Solitude is pain and loneliness.

~ Mizuki Nomura

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

The evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do.Inside my apartment I'd felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone, to be reassured. Or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world. Or it was neither of these--I was afraid I was dreaming. Indeed, considering the events of the day, it was likely that I was dreaming. I sometimes fly in my dreams, and each time I say to myself, At last--it's happening in reality and not in a dream!In any case, I needed to talk to someone, and I was alone. This is my habitual condition, by choice--or so I tell myself. Mere acquaintanceship leaves me unsatisfied, and few people are willing to accept the burdens and risks of friendship as I conceive of it.

~ Daniel Quinn

The importance of solitude is to help you to differentiate your own thoughts from those you have studied, read, heard, or unintentionally absorbed.

~ Tonya Sheridan

Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.

~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

You can't ever really have enough worth that when you're gone, the spot you left won't close over.

~ Laura Florand

And then the days came when I was alone.

~ Jean Rhys

He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die.

~ D.h. Lawrence

Solitude became, for me, an interesting mosaic of broken pieces, a place where the neglected parts of myself get collected—for better and for worse, sometimes barely tolerated and sometimes arranged into lovely patterns.

~ Laurie A. Helgoe

Some people are so boring that you are more bored when you are with them … than when you are alone.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

So I forced myself to step out of my comfort zone and go out and connect with people. I realised that no one knew me here. I could become whoever I wanted to be for these people, and that became my courage.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

solitude is not absence of love, but its complement

~ Paulo Coelho

At life's most significant moments, we are always alone

~ Paulo Coelho

Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.

~ Thomas Mann

All that is important comes in quietness and waiting.

~ Patrick Lindsay

Solitude is an interesting companion. It is both enemy and friend, comforter and tormentor. I spent a lot of time in Dun Cinzci's meat locker trying to decide which. Fortunately, when I tired of solitude, I had guilt to keep me company. Guilt is an even more interesting acquaintance than solitude, let me tell you. Solitude is a harsh but essentially benign attendant. Guilt, on the other hand, is a living, breathing creature, cruel and remorseless. It eats you from the inside out; devours what little hope you have left. It feeds on you, growing stronger with every accursed replayed memory, every useless recrimination. ~ Cayal, The Immortal Prince

~ Jennifer Fallon

Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest.What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude.

~ Peter Høeg

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Relationship Time to Aloneness. Having a companion fixes you in time and that of the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.

~ John Steinbeck

After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I had a cup of tea, thought about my day and mostly about the horse whom, though I'd only known him a short time, I called my friend. I have few friends and am glad to have a horse for a friend. After the meal I smoked a cigarette and mused on the luxury it would be to go out, instead of talking to myself and boring myself to death with the same endless stories I'm forever telling myself. I am a very boring person, despite my enormous intelligence and distinguished appearance, and nobody knows this better than I. I've often told myself that if only I were given the opportunity, I'd perhaps become the centre of intellectual society. But by dint of talking to myself so much, I tend to repeat the same things all the time. But what can you expect? I'm a recluse.

~ Leonora Carrington

Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.

~ Paolo Giordano

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

~ Octavio Paz

I owe my solitude to other people.

~ Alan W. Watts

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post office, and at the sociable, and at the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another.

~ Henry David Thoreau

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

~ James Salter

In a cool solitude of treesWhere leaves and birds a music spin,Mind that was weary is at ease,New rhythms in the soul begin.

~ William Kean Seymour

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I have attained it.

~ Hermann Hesse

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

~ Edith Wharton

Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

...I got to love solitude - to see the Moon rise and set - I had time to watch it trace the window square across the wall in silent grace...

~ John Geddes

One will probably have to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)

~ Ingmar Bergman

Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.

~ Thomas Merton

He had to hold his body very still, very still, like some vessel about to slosh over from too much motion. Gradually he managed to get control of his breathing. His excited heart beat more steadily; the pounding of the waves inside him subsided slowly. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusky reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened, and he entered. The next performance in the theatre of his soul was beginning.

~ Patrick Süskind

I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only - still, I left.

~ Mihail Drumeş

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind-- for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive-- even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing.Writing that springs from the surface of existence-- when there is no other way and deeper wells have dried up-- is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes the surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

~ Franz Kafka