Motivational Quotes

Solitude

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

- Lowell, James Russell

Best Quotes about Solitude

Solitude begets whimsies.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

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

Camus, Albert

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

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

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

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

Home, Henry

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

Einstein, Albert

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

Kundera, Milan

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

10.

Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.

Ovid

11.

Solitude is un-American.

Jong, Erica

12.

Go away, I'm all right!

Wells, H.G.

13.

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

Smith, Sydney

14.

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

Lowell, James Russell

15.

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

Sterne, Laurence

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Marvell, Andrew

19.

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

20.

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

Browne, Jackson

21.

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

Herbert, George

22.

We never touch but at points.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

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

25.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal, Henri B.

26.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

Euripides

27.

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

Dunaway, Faye

28.

The best thinking has been done in solitude.

Edison, Thomas A.

29.

A man by himself is in bad company.

Hoffer, Eric

30.

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

Chekhov, Anton

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Huxley, Aldous

34.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

Life without a friend is death without a witness.

Proverb, Spanish

37.

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

38.

I have never found a companion so companionable as solitude.

Thoreau, Henry David

39.

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

40.

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

Renard, Jules

41.

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

Hoagland, Edward

42.

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

Connolly, Cyril

43.

A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

Landor, Walter Savage

44.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.

Bruyere, Jean De La

46.

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

Boufflers

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

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.