Solitude Quotes
1. Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
2. I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
3. Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.
4. If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.
5. My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.
6. I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
7. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
8. being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
9. I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.
10. I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
11. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
12. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
13. I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
14. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
15. A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
16. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
17. From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.
18. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
19. Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.
20. I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
21. We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.
22. Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
23. How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
24. Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
25. Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once.
26. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the
room was like sunlight to me.
27. Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.
28. I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
29. Solitude sometimes is best society.
30. Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.
31. Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
32. Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
33. For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
34. I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.
35. If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.
36. We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
37. Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.
38. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
39. If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.
40. Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
41. Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
42. Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.
43. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
44. If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
45. You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.
46. I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.
47. I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference.
48. Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.
49. But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
50. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
51. To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
52. Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
53. People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.
54. Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, deathlike solitude.
55. 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.
56. When you’re socially awkward, you’re isolated more than usual, and when you’re isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.
57. I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.
58. Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s 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.
59. Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
60. I prefer to be left alone with my books.
