Solitude Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.

Arthur Schopenhauer

I came here to be for all and with all, and what I do today in my solitude will be echoed tomorrow by the multitude. What I say now with one heart will be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts...

Stephen Blackpool fall into the loneliest of lives, the life of solitude among a familiar crowd. The stranger in the land who looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it, is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces daily, that were once the countenances of friends

Charles Dickens

It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

Henry David Thoreau

Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance.

Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious.

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Remember, too, every day, and whenever you can, repeat to yourself, Lord, have mercy on all who appear before Thee today. For every hour and every moment thousands of men leave life on this earth, and their souls appear before God. And how many of them depart in solitude, unknown, sad, dejected that no one mourns for them or even knows whether they have lived or not!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I will use these last pages to sum up our circumstances. A map of the world. [...]
I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we don't fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one's friends mean to one, if one only sees them eight times a year? [...]
I use my friends rather as giglamps: there's another field I see; by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.

It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

Henry David Thoreau

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this scene also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.

Talents are nurtured best in solitude, But character on life's tempestuous seas!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument — a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself — in solitude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge college is as solitary as a dervis in the desert.

Henry David Thoreau

Great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.

Love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

New feet within my garden go,
New fingers stir the sod;
A troubadour upon the elm
Betrays the solitude. New children play upon the green,
New weary sleep below;
And still the pensive spring returns,
And still the punctual snow!

Emily Dickinson

It was evident that he revived by fits and starts. He would suddenly come to himself from actual delirium for a few minutes; he would remember and talk with complete consciousness, chiefly in disconnected phrases which he had perhaps thought out and learnt by heart in the long weary hours of his illness, in his bed, in sleepless solitude.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The cure for all the illness of life is stored in the inner depth of life itself, the access to which becomes possible when we are alone. This solitude is a world in itself, full of wonders and resources unthought of. It is absurdly near; yet so unapproachably distant.

Rabindranath Tagore