Motivational Quotes

Solitude

The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.

- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich

Best Quotes about Solitude

This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.

Bruyere, Jean De La

If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.

Renard, Jules

By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear. Dare to look in thy chest; for 'Tis thine own: And tumble up and down what thou findst there. Who cannot rest till he good fellows find, he breaks up house, turns out of doors his mind.

Herbert, George

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.

Einstein, Albert

There is convincing evidence that the search for solitude is not a luxury but a biological need. Just as humans posses a herding instinct that keeps us close to others most of the time, we also have a conflicting drive to seek out solitude. If the distance between ourselves and others becomes too great, we experience isolation and alienation, yet if the proximity to others becomes too close, we feel smothered and trapped.

Kottler, Jeffrey

Solitude is the despair of fools, the torment of the wicked, and the joy of the good.

I'm still the little southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who really didn't feel like she belonged.

Dunaway, Faye

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 and leave it alone.

Quincey, Thomas De

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign in solitude.

Wordsworth, William

10.

A man by himself is in bad company.

Hoffer, Eric

11.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone, I never found the companionable as solitude.

Thoreau, Henry David

12.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

Hoffer, Eric

13.

In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.

Sterne, Laurence

14.

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

Hoagland, Edward

15.

Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.

Ovid

16.

We never touch but at points.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. Tibullus by all means use sometimes to be alone.

Herbert, George

18.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Cioran, E. M.

19.

Go away, I'm all right!

Wells, H.G.

20.

I have never found a companion so companionable as solitude.

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

A writer who writes, I am alone... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

Blanchot, Maurice

22.

To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self.

Mabie, Hamilton

23.

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.

Mann, Thomas

24.

The best thinking has been done in solitude.

Edison, Thomas A.

25.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.

Home, Henry

28.

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

Einstein, Albert

29.

Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.

Lowell, James Russell

30.

What call thou solitude? Is not the earth with various living creatures, and the air replenished, and all these at thy command to come and play before thee?

Milton, John

31.

Life without a friend is death without a witness.

Proverb, Spanish

32.

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.

Johnson, Samuel

33.

Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore.

Cowper, William

34.

May God be gracious to each lonely one who walks in silence towards the setting sun.

35.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Huxley, Aldous

36.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich

37.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal, Henri B.

38.

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

Kundera, Milan

39.

In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.

Mathews, William

40.

Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio, or looked at a TV They had loneliness and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would mark.

Sa, Carl

41.

A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

Landor, Walter Savage

42.

Solitude begets whimsies.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

43.

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.

Weil, Simone

44.

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.

Russell, Bertrand

45.

Two Paradises t'were in one, to live in Paradise alone.

Marvell, Andrew

46.

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Dahlberg, Edward

47.

No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.

Browne, Jackson

48.

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.