Solitude Quotes

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

Harold Bloom, O Magazine, April 2003

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

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Sir Thomas Browne

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 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

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

Joseph Addison

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

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

Johann von Goethe

One can acquire everything in solitude, except character.

Marie Stendhal

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

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