Solitude Quotes

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That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.

Charles Caleb Colton

A man is never alone, not only because he is with himself and his own thoughts, but because he is with the Devil, who ever consorts with our solitude.

How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

William Butler Yeats

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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.

Solitude is only a good idea if you have the right people along to share it.

O! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought, Lost to the noble sallies of the soul! Who think it solitude to be alone.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Charles Maturin

I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings, and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization;... and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man. The season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of suffering, and the novelty of danger.

Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Eugenio Montale

Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities!

We must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me!

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there!

Science brings forth its newest discoveries in earth and heaven; it speaks to the philosopher in his solitude, and to the crowd in the market-place.

Solitude is an excellent laboratory in which to observe the extent to which manners and habits are conditioned by others.

Richard E. Byrd

It is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it is irrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut out, it can create a world for itself, and with a necromantic power can conjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of a dungeon.

Washington Irving

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.