Solitude Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.

We have gone out several times this summer to gather simples and linden blossoms, etc. In each excursion we discover something marvelous, beautiful, and useful in the magnificent forests of Indiana. At each step we can admire the grandeur, the power, the goodness of God. How bountifully He provides for all our wants — I would even say for our pleasures! I love our woods and solitude very much; …

Théodore Guérin

I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.

In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves — which makes us more indulgent and more understanding — and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.

Nadia Boulanger

Solitude swells the inner space
Like a balloon.
We are wafted hither and thither
On the air currents.
How to land it?

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

Jonathan Franzen

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us.

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.

Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself.

Georges Duhamel

If Utrillo's paintings depicted actual scenes from life, if they were not imaginative pictorial fantasies, then the whole world would have had to be completely different. If Utrillo's representation was valid, then it would mean that mankind had regressed to an astonishing, almost unbelievable degree. All the things that Fitch believed man capable of enjoying — dignity, solitude, integrity — would have been experienced in the past. And that, he thought, was impossible. If men had ever possessed these benefits, they would never have given them up.

When illusions are over, when the distractions of sense, the vagaries of fancy, and the tumults of passion have dissolved even before the body is cold, which once they so thronged and agitated, the soul merges into intellect, intellect into conscience, conscience into the unbroken, awful solitude of its own personal accountability; and though the inhabitants of the universe were within the spirit's ken, this personal accountability is as strictly alone and unshared, as if no being were throughout immensity but the spirit and its God.

The larger the ego, the less the need for other egos around. The more modest, humble, and self-effacing we feel, the more we suffer from solitude, feeling ourselves inadequate company.

Barbara Holland

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Turn the lights down for a while
And have a rock with the solitude
Many worlds are born tonight
Because the needy is everyone.

I hate solitude, but i'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.

[Gardening] is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude without being thought unsociable.

We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine.

Solitude is unbearable for those who can not bear themselves.

John Lancaster Spalding

How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.

Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society...

My brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion.

William Wordsworth

When I was going into one of my first meditation retreats, I asked my father, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, for some advice. He said, "How you act when you're alone affects the rest of your life." Even in solitude, the ruler engages in virtue.

In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still... In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights, but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself.

I belong to a group of men who fly alone. There is only one seat in the cockpit of a fighter airplane. There is no space alotted for another pilot to tune the radios in the weather or make the calls to air traffic control centers or to help with the emergency procedures or to call off the airspeed down final approach. There is no one else to break the solitude of a long cross-country flight. There is no one else to make decisions.