Solitude Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Rainer Maria Rilke

Stendhal

Carl Sandburg

Aphra Behn

Dag Hammarskjöld

Kate Chopin

Robinson Jeffers

One can acquire everything in solitude — except character.

There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other thing that oppress you - : is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rainer Maria Rilke

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

Alfred Russel Wallace

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

Thomas De Quincey

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man's being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

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.

For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the White Hand Of Moses on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.
V.

Fortunately art is a community effort – a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.

Robinson Jeffers

Friendship needs no words — it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit,
But God to man doth speak in solitude.

John Stuart Blackie

We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Life is the desert, life the solitude;
Death joins us to the great majority.

Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

My public life is before you; and I know you will believe me when I say, that when I sit down in solitude to the labours of my profession, the only questions I ask myself are, What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves. The great omission in American life is solitude.

With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication.