Motivational Quotes

Solitude

Life without a friend is death without a witness.

- Proverb, Spanish

Best Quotes about 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

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.

Life without a friend is death without a witness.

Proverb, Spanish

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Mathews, William

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

Brandeis, Louis D.

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 solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

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

Einstein, Albert

11.

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

12.

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

13.

A man by himself is in bad company.

Hoffer, Eric

14.

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

15.

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

Browne, Jackson

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Hoagland, Edward

19.

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

Einstein, Albert

20.

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

Dunaway, Faye

21.

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

22.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

Herbert, George

24.

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

Boufflers

25.

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

26.

The best thinking has been done in solitude.

Edison, Thomas A.

27.

Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.

Ovid

28.

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

Home, Henry

29.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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

Marvell, Andrew

31.

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

32.

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

Sterne, Laurence

33.

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

Connolly, Cyril

34.

We never touch but at points.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

37.

In solitude, where we are least alone.

Byron, Lord

38.

Go away, I'm all right!

Wells, H.G.

39.

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

Camus, Albert

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Huxley, Aldous

43.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

44.

Solitude is un-American.

Jong, Erica

45.

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

46.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

Euripides

47.

Solitude begets whimsies.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

48.

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

49.

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

Lowell, James Russell

50.

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

Miller, Henry