Solitude Quotes

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

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Sir Francis Bacon

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 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

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

Miguel de Unanimo

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, the safeguard of mediocrity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

Robert Cecil

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

Karl Kraus

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

James Russell Lowell

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

Albert Einstein

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

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 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

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

William Powell

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

One can acquire everything in solitude, except character.

Marie Stendhal

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

Rainer Maria Rilke

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

Vladimir Nabokov

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.

Sir Francis Bacon

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

Harold Bloom, O Magazine, April 2003

This great misfortune - To be incapable of solitude.

La Bruyere

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

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

Joseph Addison

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

Sir Thomas Browne

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

Paul Valery

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Henry David Thoreau

Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition...

Amelia Ba

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

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict - Girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.

Percival

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

Gian Vincenzo Gravina

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone all leave it alone.

Thomas De Quincey

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

Johann von Goethe

It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self - Centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self - Reliance

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