Solitude Quotes

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Paul Johannes Tillich

Talents are best nurtured in solitude; but character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Albert Einstein

A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.

Seneca

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.

Sir Francis Bacon

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

Octavio Paz

In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wide waste there still is a tree, And a bird in the solitude singing, Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

Lord Byron, Stanzas to Augusta

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the real world since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Giacomo Leopardi

One can acquire everything in solitude - Except character.

Marie Henri Beyle

This great misfortune - To be incapable of solitude.

La Bruyere

One whose chief regard is for his own mind, and for the divinity within him and the service of its goodness, will strike no poses, utter no complaints, and crave neither for solitude nor yet for a crowd. Best of all, his life will be free from continual pursuing and avoiding.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations? Book Three

One can acquire everything in solitude, except character.

Marie Stendhal

Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.

Han Suyin

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

James Russell Lowell

Only in solitude do we find ourselves and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

Miguel de Unanimo

The power to bring me out of solitude - Or to push me back into it - Had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.

Martha Beck, O Magazine, February 2003

Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.

John Stuart Mill

A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

Gian Vincenzo Gravina

The great omission in American life is solitude... that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incinerator of the spirit.

Marya Mannes

I love tranquil solitude And such society As is quiet, wise, and good.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Sir Thomas Browne

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.

Erica Jong

To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.

Joseph Addison

To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.

Deepak Chopra

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

Karl Kraus

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.

William Powell

He who lives in solitude may make his own laws.

Publilius Syrus

Talents are best nurtured in solitude character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Johann von Goethe

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Harold Bloom, O Magazine, April 2003

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Paul Valery

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal

There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

Colette

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

Vladimir Nabokov

Goodbye, goodbye, I hate the word. Solitude has long since turned brown and withered, sitting bitter in my mouth and heavy in my veins.

R. M. Grenon

In solitude especialy do we begin to appreciate the advantage of living with someone who can think.

Henry David Thoreau