Solitude Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

'Tis solitude should teach us how to die;
It hath no flatterers; vanity can give No hollow aid; alone—man with his God must strive.

As for solitude, I cannot understand how certain people seek to lay claim to intellectual stature, nobility of soul and strength of character, yet have not the slightest feeling for seclusion; for solitude, I maintain, when joined with a quiet contemplation of nature, a serene and conscious faith in creation and the Creator, and a few vexations from outside is the only school for a mind of lofty endowment.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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.

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 is unbearable for those who can not bear themselves.

John Lancaster Spalding

Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

One of the marks of maturity is the need for solitude: a city should not merely draw men together in many varied activities, but should permit each person to find, near at hand, moments of seclusion and peace.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

I have found nothing half so good
As my long-planned half solitude,
Where I can sit up half the night
With some friend that has the wit
Not to allow his looks to tell
When I am unintelligible.

William Butler Yeats

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.