Motivational Quotes

Solitude

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

Best Quotes about Solitude

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

Lowell, James Russell

Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

Kundera, Milan

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal, Henri B.

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

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

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Einstein, Albert

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.

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

10.

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

Browne, Jackson

11.

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

12.

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

Boufflers

13.

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

14.

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

Herbert, George

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.

Ovid

20.

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

21.

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

Chekhov, Anton

22.

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

Brandeis, Louis D.

23.

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

24.

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

Marvell, Andrew

25.

A man by himself is in bad company.

Hoffer, Eric

26.

Solitude begets whimsies.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

27.

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

28.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

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

Dunaway, Faye

30.

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

Smith, Sydney

31.

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

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.

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

34.

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

35.

Solitude is un-American.

Jong, Erica

36.

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

37.

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

Connolly, Cyril

38.

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

39.

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

Hoagland, Edward

40.

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

41.

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

Huxley, Aldous

42.

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

43.

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

44.

This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.

Bruyere, Jean De La

45.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

Euripides

46.

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

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.

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

Einstein, Albert

49.

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

50.

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

Carlyle, Thomas