Motivational Quotes

Solitude

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

- Lowell, James Russell

Best Quotes about Solitude

This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.

Bruyere, Jean De La

Life without a friend is death without a witness.

Proverb, Spanish

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal, Henri B.

I have never found a companion so companionable as solitude.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Dunaway, Faye

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

Hoagland, Edward

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Connolly, Cyril

13.

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

Marvell, Andrew

14.

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

15.

In solitude, where we are least alone.

Byron, Lord

16.

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

Brandeis, Louis D.

17.

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

Mathews, William

18.

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

19.

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

Smith, Sydney

20.

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

Boufflers

21.

Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.

Ovid

22.

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

Sterne, Laurence

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Huxley, Aldous

27.

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

Chekhov, Anton

28.

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

Lowell, James Russell

29.

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

Kundera, Milan

30.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

31.

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.

32.

Solitude begets whimsies.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

33.

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

Einstein, Albert

34.

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

35.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

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

Herbert, George

38.

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

Camus, Albert

39.

The best thinking has been done in solitude.

Edison, Thomas A.

40.

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

Browne, Jackson

41.

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

42.

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

43.

You have already failed if you need a lot of inspectors.

44.

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

45.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

Euripides

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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