Solitude Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.

Rainer Maria Rilke

It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush... It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.

Reading...that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Loneliness is only an opportunity to cut adrift and find yourself. In solitude you are least alone.

When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Arthur Schopenhauer

On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks!

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake

Jean-Paul Sartre

Among the numerous requisites that must concur to complete an author, few are of more importance than an early entrance into the living world. The seed of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public. Argumentation may be taught in colleges, and theories formed in retirement; but the artifice of embellishment and the powers of attraction can be gained only by a general converse.

Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...

Rainer Maria Rilke

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Albert Einstein

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude.

Henry David Thoreau

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.

Henry David Thoreau

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

The sorrowful spirit finds relaxation in solitude. It abhors people, as a wounded deer deserts the herd and lives in a cave until it is healed or dead.

The two conditions that lead others to languor – i.e. leisure and solitude – him made sharper.

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along....

Rainer Maria Rilke

I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.

Michel de Montaigne