Solitude Quotes

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 playfield of Satan.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

Gian Vincenzo Gravina

This great misfortune - To be incapable of solitude.

La Bruyere

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

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

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

Johann von Goethe

Solitude is the beginning of all freedom.

William Orville Douglas

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 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

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

Harold Bloom, O Magazine, April 2003