Solitude Quotes
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.Henry David Thoreau
I learned... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.Brenda Ueland
One can acquire everything in solitude - Except character.Marie Henri Beyle
He who lives in solitude may make his own laws.Publilius Syrus
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.Vladimir Nabokov
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.Paul Valery
Talents are best nurtured in solitude character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.Johann von Goethe
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
Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.Karl Kraus
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.Stendhal
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
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
One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict - Girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.Percival
Solitude is the beginning of all freedom.William Orville Douglas
This great misfortune - To be incapable of solitude.La Bruyere
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
Solitude vivifies isolation kills.Joseph Roux
The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.Sir Francis Bacon
I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.Henry David Thoreau
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
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.Harold Bloom, O Magazine, April 2003
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.Carl Sandburg
Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.William Powell
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
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.Octavio Paz
I love tranquil solitude And such society As is quiet, wise, and good.Percy Bysshe Shelley
Solitude is the best nurse of wisdom.Laurence Sterne
But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (on the death of Decoud)
Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.Robert Cecil
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
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
Only in solitude do we find ourselves and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.Miguel de Unanimo
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.James Russell Lowell
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
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
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity.Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness, the independence of solitude.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance (essay)
