Solitude Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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

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 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.

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

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

George Santayana

Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past--oh so bright and clear!--oh so longed after!--because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall--or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable--more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Solitude becomes a sort of tangible enemy, the more dangerous, because it dwells within the citadel itself.

Oh, river! darkling river! what a voice
Is that thou utterest while all else is still--
The ancient voice that, centuries ago,
Sounded between thy hills, while Rome was yet
A weedy solitude by Tiber's stream!

William Cullen Bryant

In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.

William Mathews

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One's inner voices become audible... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.

One sees that dead, vacant look steal over the rarest, finest of women's faces... in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces...

Rebecca Harding Davis

Our two first parents, yet the only two Of mankind, in the happy garden placed, Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, Uninterrupted joy, unrivalled love In blissful solitude.

Society than solitude is worse, And man to man is still the greatest curse.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of images before me rise, Accompanied by feelings of delight Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed.

William Wordsworth

Introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation.

The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins,
Hornell--
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life.

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, 'Suppertime!'

Steven Pressfield

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build on the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all. Thus a man supported by faith, hope, and charity, with an unshaken hold upon them does not need the scriptures... And many live by these three things in solitude without books.

Augustine of Hippo

No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.

William Gilmore Simms

It seems to me that today if the artist wishes to be serious... he must once more sink himself in solitude.

Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes.