Motivational Quotes

Solitude

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

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Solitude

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

The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

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

Dunaway, Faye

We never touch but at points.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Browne, Jackson

In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?

Gaulle, Charles De

In solitude, where we are least alone.

Byron, Lord

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

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal, Henri B.

10.

The right to be alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.

Brandeis, Louis D.

11.

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

Sterne, Laurence

12.

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

13.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

Thoreau, Henry David

14.

Solitude begets whimsies.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

15.

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

Kundera, Milan

16.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

Landor, Walter Savage

18.

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

19.

An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Miller, Henry

20.

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

Renard, Jules

21.

The best thinking has been done in solitude.

Edison, Thomas A.

22.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Camus, Albert

23.

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

24.

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

Einstein, Albert

25.

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

Hoagland, Edward

26.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Percival, Lord

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Herbert, George

32.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

Euripides

33.

I have never found a companion so companionable as solitude.

Thoreau, Henry David

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Go away, I'm all right!

Wells, H.G.

37.

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

38.

A man by himself is in bad company.

Hoffer, Eric

39.

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

Cowley, Abraham

40.

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

41.

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

Lowell, James Russell

42.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

The higher we rise, the more isolated we become; all elevations are cold.

Boufflers

44.

This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.

Bruyere, Jean De La

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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.