Solitude Quotes

#1. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. #Quote by Octavio Paz

#2. The only thing that [Amaranta] did not keep in mind in her fearsome plan was that in spite of her pleas to God she might die before Rebeca. That was, in fact, what happened. At the final moment, however, Amaranta did not feel frustrated, but, on the contrary, free of all bitterness because death had awarded her the privilege of announcing itself several years ahead of time. She saw it on one burning afternoon sewing with her on the porch a short time after Meme had left for school. She saw it because it was a woman dressed in blue with long hair, with a sort of antiquated look, and with a certain resemblance to Pilar Ternera during the time when she had helped with the chores in the kitchen. Fernanda was present several times and did not see her, in spite of the fact that she was so real – so human and on one occasion asked of Amaranta the favor of threading a needle. Death did not tell her when she was going to die or whether her hour was assigned before that of Rebeca, but ordered her to begin sewing her own shroud on the next sixth of April. She was authorized to make it as complicated and as fine as she wanted, but just as honestly executed as Rebeca's, and she was told that she would die without pain, fear, or bitterness at dusk on the day that she finished it. Trying to waste the most time possible, Amaranta ordered some rough flax and spun the thread herself. She did it so carefully that the work alone took four years. Then she started the sewing. As she got closer to #Quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#3. Solitude stands by the window
She turns her head as I walk in the room
I can see by her eyes she's been waiting
Standing in the slant of the late afternoon #Quote by Suzanne Vega

#4. Solitude is the worst of punishments. It's like waiting in the Death Row for your last supper and the final blow, the chair or gas or whatever. The utter act of capital punishment, except it's lasting an eternity. You'd say being alone, single, can have an array of possibilities, positive sides. You'd argue when being approached with such a statement! You'd mention how good it feels to be independent, to have a free choice, not depending on anyone else's opinion. The space in your life, the remote in your hand that is not wrestled for, the cookies, still present in the jar, waiting for you to eat them. The wide bed and the covers just for your own pleasure and usage. I can see you throwing your arguments at me, fighting passionately since you strongly believe that what you say, is the truth.
And then, the night falls, devouring your clearly visible assumptions and postulates, making some room for doubt and fright. You hear the silence that grows around you, feel it possessing you from the inside and you don't have time to brace yourself for what's coming. The horrid feeling of incompletion and senseless existence catch you with overpowering force, making your throat shrink and your mind tight. You're scared so much that all seems so dark and eerie. Then, you ask yourself whether it was really you who chose this, who decided upon this unbearable state of utter loneliness. The answer is usually the same. It is always you, always me. Not consciously, but by our choices, we #Quote by Magdalena Ganowska

#5. Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude. #Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#6. Everybody likes to see the loner hitched. It tells them everything is right with the world. #Quote by Philip O Ceallaigh

#7. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One's inner voices become audible ... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. #Quote by Wendell Berry

#8. It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there... #Quote by Jonathan Franzen

#9. Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#10. To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#11. Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet - and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him - and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity - it would be better to live so than die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how - only to live! ... How true! Lord, how true! Man is a scoundrel! And he's a scoundrel who calls him a scoundrel for that. #Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#12. The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored. #Quote by Criss Jami

#13. I think solitude is a really positive thing. I cherish solitude immensely. In today's society, there's so much pressure to communicate, eat out, be friends with people. Why can't you read a book on your own? Why have you got to have a book club? #Quote by Nicky Wire

#14. I prefer delivery and solitude. #Quote by J.M. Darhower

#15. The use of knowledge in our sex (beside the amusement of solitude) is to moderate the passions and learn to be contented with a small expense, which are the certain effects of a studious life and, it may be, preferable even to that fame which men have engrossed to themselves and will not suffer us to share. #Quote by Mary Wortley Montagu

#16. It is perhaps no use now to reply to your actual words; for what I could say about your disposition to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner life into harmony, or about anything else that oppresses you - : it is always what I have said before: always the wish that you might be able to find patience enough in yourself to endure, and single-heartedness enough to believe; that you might win increasing trust in what is difficult, and in your solitude among other people. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, at all events. And #Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

#17. I'm going inside of myself and never coming out. #Quote by Jennifer Elisabeth

#18. Unless a writer's capable of solitude, he should leave books alone and go into the theater. #Quote by John Steinbeck

#19. Sometimes, it's important to turn off the noise from the outside world. Sometimes, it's critical to stop the banter even within oneself. Intentional solitude and quiet can make us strong for tomorrow. #Quote by David Paul Kirkpatrick

#20. Before us, over the tree tops, we beheld a great field of open sea to the East. Sheer above us rose single pines, black with precipices. There was no sound but that of the distant breakers, mounting from all around, and the chirp of countless insects in the brush. Not a man, not a sail upon the sea; the very largeness of the view increased the sense of solitude. #Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

#21. As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I've lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of 'solitude of not belonging' has started invading me like ivy on a wall. #Quote by Benjamin Moser

#22. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. #Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

#23. All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#24. There is a lantern in the soul, which makes your solitude luminous. Solitude need not remain lonely. It can awaken to its luminous warmth. The soul redeems and transfigures everything because the soul is the divine space. When you inhabit your solitude fully and experience its outer extremes of isolation and abandonment, you will find that at its heart there is neither loneliness nor emptiness but intimacy and shelter. #Quote by John O'Donohue

#25. Tears do not burn except in solitude. #Quote by Emil M. Cioran

#26. Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. #Quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#27. We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. #Quote by Michel De Montaigne

#28. Tuatha De do not walk the human realm alone. Actually, they don't walk alone much anywhere. Only the occasional rogue Fae will do so."
"Like yourself?"
"Yes Most of my kind have no fondness for solitude. Those who walk alone are not to be trusted."
"Really," she said dryly.
"Except for me," he amended, with a faint, insouciant grin. #Quote by Karen Marie Moning

#29. A habit of solitude in early childhood is not easily broken. Indeed, it may prove lifelong. #Quote by Philippa Pearce

#30. We are not to practice Bible reading, fasting, solitude, prayer, and other disciplines to make God happy with us but to make space to hear how happy God is with us because of Jesus. #Quote by Jimmy Davis

#31. The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape. #Quote by Elizabeth Bowen

#32. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating - and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside. #Quote by Patrick Suskind

#33. And no one realizes we should all, always, look like that, each with his eyes full of horror at his own, inescapable solitude. #Quote by Luigi Pirandello

#34. Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. #Quote by Milan Kundera

#35. Unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility. From his position at the edge of the school around him, he took vicarious pleasure in the activities of those around him, silently celebrating the rise or fall of this or that playground emperor, or the examination failures of particularly unappetizing class-fellows: the delights of the spectator. #Quote by Salman Rushdie

#36. Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity. #Quote by Kent Nerburn

#37. Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale. #Quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#38. Is it better to part with your introversion or to accept a diagnosis that allows you to have it as long as you see it as a problem? The introverted child's plea for solitude seems to be either unheeded or treated. #Quote by Laurie A. Helgoe

#39. there is a difference between
loneliness and solitude,
one will empty you and
one will fill you.

you have the power to choose. #Quote by AVA.

#40. For I say to you in all the sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone – when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will – then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought – the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army. #Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#41. The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices - after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's. #Quote by Tom Stoppard

#42. I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#43. When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself. #Quote by Michel De Montaigne

#44. In a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes. #Quote by Neil M. Gunn

#45. I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough #Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

#46. Solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside. I think in my own way I'm aware of this danger - probably through experience - and that's why I've had to constantly keep my body in motion, in some cases pushing myself to the limit, in order to heal the loneliness I feel inside and to put it in perspective. Not so much as an intentional act, but as an instinctive reaction. #Quote by Haruki Murakami

#47. I am used to my loneliness. My silences make me feel alive! #Quote by Avijeet Das

#48. It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before. #Quote by Nick Hornby

#49. Solitude, community, and ministry are certainly not just for celibates! Celibates also have a hard time keeping up. #Quote by Henri Nouwen

#50. I know why you seek solitude. You suffer; I see it day by day. You sure you do not suffer needlessly? There are other ways, Frodo, other paths that we might take.
I know what you would say. And it would seem like wisdom but for the warning in my heart. #Quote by J.R.R. Tolkien

#51. Fly-fishing is a magic way to recapture the rapture of solitude without the pangs of loneliness. #Quote by John D. Voelker

#52. For a writer, for the solitude to write, you don't need a room of your own, you need a house. #Quote by Sandra Cisneros

#53. solitude is a sad thing, with no heart to which to confide your griefs. #Quote by Jules Verne

#54. Stop fucking trying to dig into my psyche. It doesn't like visitors. It likes its solitude. It likes the cobwebs in the fucking attic, so stop trying to clean them up. #Quote by Tammy Falkner

#55. Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. (p. 235) #Quote by Daniel J. Siegel

#56. My destiny is solitude, and my life is work. #Quote by Richard Wagner

#57. People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude. #Quote by Sherry Turkle

#58. Art is supposed to reflect your journey through real life. Your discovery of your character in solitude and around other people, the moments of clarity when you feel loved and the moment when your heart breaks so much that you can hear it crack. When you run careless and free on open fields and when you're struggling on your way home on the bus. This is what makes you a real artist. Experiences, moments, stories. Falling recklessly in love, losing someone you love and then learning to belong to yourself again. Going to new places, meeting new people, driving in the middle of the night on empty streets. Going to the ocean and staying there until 6 a.m, smoking cigarettes and talking about roses and butterflies. These are the things that will give you something worth writing about, worth singing about, worth creating art around. #Quote by Charlotte Eriksson

#59. I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it. #Quote by Eugene Ionesco

#60. I spent half my childhood in the shadows. Hiding from my father or my brother. Creeping from a place of solitude to another. Seeing while unseen, and pretending I was a part of what I saw. Making up a life where I wasn't an outcast. #Quote by Joe Abercrombie

#61. A sense of solitude is one of the most beautiful things that parents can give a child. It doesn't mean leaving the child alone, but it does mean creating safe spaces where the child can be with other people. It does mean directing their attention to God. #Quote by Henri Nouwen

#62. One thing solitude does is give you plenty of time to reflect. #Quote by Alexa Land

#63. It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude ... #Quote by Michel Foucault

#64. He was my husband, my apartment mate, my soul mate, the father of the little plant in my confused soil, the lover who had made me adore his body without inhibition after my years of relative solitude, the person for whom I'd given up my old self. #Quote by Elizabeth Kostova

#65. Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. #Quote by Germaine Greer

#66. All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone. #Quote by Blaise Pascal

#67. How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population. #Quote by Herman Melville

#68. And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless. #Quote by Chief Seattle

#69. She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale windigos with aching eyes, tongues of flame. #Quote by Louise Erdrich

#70. Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God. #Quote by Robert Frost

#71. My solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company. #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#72. I must have the personal dialogue, the private time, with each painting in progress. I can't share it with anyone until it's done. #Quote by Ken Danby

#73. I am a stranger in this world, and there is a severe solitude and painful lonesomeness in my exile. #Quote by Kahlil Gibran

#74. It didn't occur to me that solitude is like a mysterious drug; at first, you fear it and reject it. But when you finally try it, you begin to crave the way it makes you feel. #Quote by Shivya Nath

#75. O thou the last fulfilment of life, Death, my death, come and whisper to me!

Day after day I have kept watch for thee; for thee have I borne the joys and pangs of life.

All that I am, that I have, that I hope and all my love have ever flowed towards thee in depth of secrecy. One final glance from thine eyes and my life will be ever thine own.

The flowers have been woven and the garland is ready for the bridegroom. After the wedding the bride shall leave her home and meet her lord alone in the solitude of night. #Quote by Rabindranath Tagore

#76. For the natural selectivity of the island I will have to substitute a conscious selectivity based on another sense of values – a sense of values I have become more aware of here. Island precepts, I might call them if I could define them, signposts toward another way of living. Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Balance of physical, intellectual and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittent of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells. #Quote by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#77. No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society. #Quote by William Gilmore Simms

#78. fall
in love
with your solitude #Quote by Rupi Kaur

#79. If you feel all damp and lonely like a mushroom, find the thick, creamy soup of joyfulness and just dive into it in order to make life tastier #Quote by Munia Khan

#80. Better is it', she thought, 'to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the humane spirit, which are', she said aloud as her habit was when deeply moved, 'contemplation, solitude, love. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#81. I, who had had my heart full for hours, took advantage of an early moment of solitude, to cry in it very bitterly. Suddenly a little hairy head thrust itself from behind my pillow into my face, rubbing its ears and nose against me in a responsive agitation, and drying the tears as they came. #Quote by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

#82. Let us not wait until the specter of solitude and isolation crawls into the alleys of our lives. Let us not the veiled threat of despair thrust us into oppression through our deficiency in interaction, and expand the frailty and the anxiety of our existence. Let us reach out and talk instead and use an authentic language in an unambiguous wording, and connect the dots, without fear. ("Words had disappeared") #Quote by Erik Pevernagie

#83. In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him. #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#84. If a woman is to know herself, then periods of solitude should be courted, planned, and embraced. #Quote by Mary Blakely

#85. Not with any hope of defeating solitude in that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it #Quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#86. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#87. Society is no comfort, to one not sociable. #Quote by William Shakespeare

#88. The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant. #Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

#89. We should pattern our life by a triangular guide: calmness and sweetness are the two sides; the base is happiness. Every day, one should remind himself: " I am a prince of peace, sitting on the throne of poise, directing my kingdom of activity." Whether one acts quickly or slowly, in solitude or in the busy marts of men, his center should be peaceful, poised #Quote by Paramahansa Yogananda

#90. One of the many advantages of being a loner is that often there's time to think, ponder, brood, meditate deeply, and figure things out to one's satisfaction. #Quote by Andrea Seigel

#91. Fear was Can't.
Fear was Won't.
But fear wasn't ever a choice.
To never fear was to never hope. Never love. never live. To never fear the dark was to never smile as the dawn kissed your face. To never fear solitude was to never know the joy of a beauty in your arms.
Part of having is the fear of losing.
Part of creating is the fear of it breaking.
Part of beginning is the fear of your ending.
Fear is never a choice.
Never a choice.
But letting it rule you is. #Quote by Jay Kristoff

#92. When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that. #Quote by Gertrude Stein

#93. A person who finds silence and solitude boring is a person who is himself boring, empty of anything worth consideration. #Quote by Ted Dekker

#94. Nothing has the power to remind you how alone you are like walking through a conglomeration of empty skyscrapers. #Quote by Matthew Tysz

#95. The silence of architecture is a responsive,remembering silene.A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude. #Quote by Juhanni Pallasmaa

#96. The ideal man is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert. #Quote by Swami Vivekananda

#97. And so began the years of my internment, where I was locked away from all human things, imprisoned in my solitude like Rapunzel imprisoned in the tower. I knew instinctively that I was still very much alive within the tomb, that what was good and kind and loving and generous in me still existed in the very depths of my being, buried beneath layers of fire and ice. But I also knew that I was incapable of rising from the tomb myself, of bursting forth on my own through the thick layers that surrounded me. It was as if a spell had been cast; the only thing that could break it now was a human word, a human touch.
Which never came. #Quote by Susan Speranza

#98. I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible. #Quote by Mark Rothko

#99. Poor Peter, he needs to be loved so much!
It sounded so cold when he said he didn't need any friends. Oh, he's so wrong! I don't think he means it. He clings to his masculinity, his solitude and his feigned indif- ference so he can maintain his role, so he'll never, ever have to show his feelings. #Quote by Anne Frank

#100. Stars also symbolize the cycle of life, solitude and gravity. They glow in the dark energy that's the majority of space, and remind us that even in the pitch black, there's always something that can shine. #Quote by L.J. Shen

#101. The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the "meaning" of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer. #Quote by Herbert Marcuse

#102. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature...solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself. #Quote by Matt Haig

#103. The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer. #Quote by Eugene Delacroix

#104. Social life is filled with doubts and vain aspirings; solitude, when the imagination is dethroned, is turned to weariness and ennui. #Quote by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

#105. By marrying to soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin. #Quote by Augustus Y. Napier

#106. I am never less alone than when alone. #Quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero

#107. The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one's mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible. #Quote by Fennel Hudson

#108. He resented the intrusion, he cherished his solitude as his only and last freedom in life. #Quote by D.H. Lawrence

#109. At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul. #Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

#110. It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone. #Quote by Jessamyn West

#111. Your way of being present to your community may require times of absence, prayer, writing, or solitude. These too are times for your community. #Quote by Henri J.M. Nouwen

#112. For we are so constituted by nature, that we are ever prone to compare ourselves with others; and our happiness or misery depends very much on the objects and persons around us. On this account, nothing is more dangerous than solitude: there our imagination, always disposed to rise, taking a new flight on the wings of fancy, pictures to us a chain of beings of whom we seem the most inferior. #Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#113. Crowd is a gold mine, you can find many treasures over there; solitude is a gold mind, you can find many treasures over there. As long as you are determined to find treasures, the right place to look for them is everywhere! #Quote by Mehmet Murat Ildan

#114. I took only one suitcase, and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without. #Quote by Martha Gellhorn

#115. Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own. #Quote by P.D. James

#116. A man is never alone, not only because he is with himself and his own thoughts, but because he is with the Devil, who ever consorts with our solitude. #Quote by Thomas Browne

#117. If you can't write, read.
If you can't read, walk.
Or walk and read, then write. #Quote by Joyce Rachelle

#118. Many have no happier moments than those that they pass in solitude, abandoned to their own imagination, which sometimes puts sceptres in their hands or miters on their heads, shifts the scene of pleasure with endless variety, bids all the forms of beauty sparkle before them, and gluts them with every change of visionary luxury. #Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

#119. Some people hate being single so much that they are often the boyfriend or girlfriend of someone who they do not love. #Quote by Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#120. I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character - perfect concord is the result. #Quote by Charlotte Bronte

#121. Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people. #Quote by Eugene Ionesco

#122. The cat makes himself the companion of your hours of solitude, melancholy and toil. #Quote by Theophile Gautier

#123. I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude. #Quote by Michael Chabon

#124. Solitude must be accepted with all its difficulties. #Quote by Albert Camus

#125. I think I meant an intimation of sadness, a first recognition that there was so much to understand that one might never find one's way and the first signs, perhaps, that for a nature like mine, the way would not be easy. I cannot be sure that I felt all that then, although I can be sure that it was in the fig tree, a few years later, that I was first puzzled by the conflict which would haunt me, harm me, and benefit me the rest of my life: simply, the stubborn, relentless, driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be. #Quote by Lillian Hellman

#126. Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves. #Quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#127. And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person ... that solitude was what one relished the most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane? #Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

#128. Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world. #Quote by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

#129. Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing. #Quote by Henri Nouwen

#130. There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself. #Quote by David Ignatow

#131. For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins. #Quote by Paul Auster

#132. Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time. #Quote by Steven L. Peck

#133. She waited for the material pictures which she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination. She waited in vain. She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her. #Quote by Kate Chopin

#134. There is no solitude greater than the samurai's, unless perhaps it be that of a tiger in the jungle. #Quote by Jean-Pierre Melville

#135. Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. #Quote by Marcel Proust

#136. I am very low. The tears gush as I write but, thank God, I generally feel relief from thus unburdening my mind on paper... Oh, how my heart longs after a companion & how I often wish for an establishment of my own, but I
may then be too old to attach anyone & my life shall have passed in that dreary solitude I so ill endure. #Quote by Anne Lister

#137. Nature, take my breath with you; renew it with the wild breeze and fill my being up with so much soul, ego learns to fade away. #Quote by Nikki Rowe

#138. For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: Life
real life
was just a solitude waiting to be transfigured. #Quote by Kevin Brockmeier

#139. I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone else. Some people would be better off alone, but they feel they've got to get hold of someone to prove they're worthwhile. #Quote by Liv Ullmann

#140. I had a cup of tea, thought about my day and mostly about the horse whom, though I'd only known him a short time, I called my friend. I have few friends and am glad to have a horse for a friend. After the meal I smoked a cigarette and mused on the luxury it would be to go out, instead of talking to myself and boring myself to death with the same endless stories I'm forever telling myself. I am a very boring person, despite my enormous intelligence and distinguished appearance, and nobody knows this better than I. I've often told myself that if only I were given the opportunity, I'd perhaps become the centre of intellectual society. But by dint of talking to myself so much, I tend to repeat the same things all the time. But what can you expect? I'm a recluse. #Quote by Leonora Carrington

#141. People sometimes act as though owning books you haven't read constitutes a charade or pretense, but for me, there's a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn't given itself over to you yet--sometimes I'm the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be. ~ Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude #Quote by Leah Price

#142. Nothing is more despicable than the old age of a passionate man. When the vigour of youth fails him, and his amusements pall with frequent repetition, his occasional rage sinks by decay of strength into peevishness; that peevishness, for want of novelty and variety, becomes habitual; the world falls off from around him, and he is left, as Homer expresses it, to devour his own heart in solitude and contempt. #Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

#143. I couldn't see killing myself if I had a book that was only half-read: Fountainhead, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude? No. I figured that those who killed themselves first had to finish whatever book they were reading...if it were any good, that is. Of course, there's always the occasional book that makes you want to throw yourself off a bridge just for having wasted your time reading it. But I usually finished those ones, too. #Quote by Michael Anthony

#144. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, 'Goodness, you're a quick reader!' when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. #Quote by Zoe Heller

#145. The breath of song in your remembering eyes cascades fragile reflections of time-steeped sunsets tinting delicate snowflakes with the solitude of a sleeping forest where ancient secrets lie waiting, undisturbed by knowing, tranquil in the forgetfulness of yesterday's silvery silence #Quote by Sean Terrence Best

#146. I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. #Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

#147. Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone. #Quote by Jean Rhys

#148. I find it quite incredible how much peace and quiet a person actually needs in order to devote himself entirely to his thoughts. #Quote by Oddny Eir

#149. Tongues wrangled dark at a man.
He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone.
In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone. #Quote by Carl Sandburg

#150. our first experiences of pleasurable solitude teach us how to be content by ourselves and shape the conditions in which we seek it. #Quote by Kate Bolick

#151. The quiet wasn't so lonely if you listened to how much sound was hidden in silence. #Quote by Rae Mariz

#152. Imagination is the greatest solitude #Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

#153. I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva's tower ... I live still a collegiate student ... and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world ... aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all. #Quote by Robert Burton

#154. Friends are like sugar. When you have them, you'll feel happiness. When you have too many of them, you will suffer. #Quote by Ade Santi

#155. Emotional chaos supplied by detachment, remoteness, and aloneness creates its own pathos of loneliness, quiet desperation, and despair. A person who lives in seclusion experiences a stronger yearning to blunt their solitude by establishing a false sense of connection via the artifice of plugging into television, engaging in Internet surfacing, and participating in other entertaining diversionary activities that fill the void of mental stillness. Americans multitasking on electronic devices is escapism at megabyte speed. #Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

#156. [Saint Anthony] said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. #Quote by Elizabeth Gilbert

#157. Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#158. Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. Jesus himself entered into this furnace. There he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant ('turn stones into loaves'), to be spectacular ('throw yourself down'), and to be powerful ('I will give you all these kingdoms'). There he affirmed God as the only source of his identity ('You must worship the Lord your God and serve him alone'). Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter - the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self. #Quote by Henri J.M. Nouwen

#159. Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others. #Quote by Brennan Manning

#160. they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable? "Of #Quote by Aldous Huxley

#161. For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of 'old people' and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end. #Quote by Irene Nemirovsky

#162. Moments spent alone make us realize the value of our own thoughts. Value your solitude. #Quote by Avijeet Das

#163. Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place. #Quote by Henri J.M. Nouwen

#164. The painter or draftsman ought to be solitary, in order that the well-being of the body not sap the vigour of the mind. #Quote by Leonardo Da Vinci

#165. Prayer is an end to isolation. It is living our daily life with someone; with him who alone can deliver us from solitude. #Quote by Georges Lefebvre

#166. I choose solitude over cold kisses. If it isn't love, it is poison. #Quote by Anita Krizzan

#167. For under moonlight the forms of the earth were liquid and they passed in or out of his body who ventured, in solitude, some gesture of communication with those forms. Especially under moonlight, especially when his own breath was the purest liquid. Thus Aziz Khan. Sometimes almost bewildered as a bird, compelled to flick from the sides of his body, not knowing what it was he did, never questioning his own actions but performing them without realising that, ardent though was his faith in Islam, the god he was most devoted to was the cosmos. #Quote by Zulfikar Ghose

#168. Life has ill-prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers. #Quote by Laurie R. King

#169. Alone time is something that should not be looked down upon. Perhaps people who crave deep silence and solitude are connected to their purpose more than anyone else does, while those who do not believe in the beauty of a solitary mind seem to lack a sense of their own depths. #Quote by Sai Pradeep

#170. You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove. This truth was once beautifully conveyed by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in his interpretation of a scene from Gabriel García Márquez's classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: Márquez tells of a village where people were afflicted with a strange plague of forgetfulness, a kind of contagious amnesia. Starting with the oldest inhabitants and working its way through the population, the plague causes people to forget the names of even the most common everyday objects. One young man, still unaffected, tries to limit the damage by putting labels on everything. "This is a table," "This is a window," "This is a cow; it has to be milked every morning." And at the entrance to the town, on the main road, he puts up two large signs. One reads "The name of our village is Macondo," and the larger one reads "God exists." The message I get from that story is that we can, and probably will, forget most of what we have learned in life - the math, the history, the chemical formulas, the address and phone number of the first house we lived in when we got married - and all that forgetting will do us no harm. But if we forget whom we belong to, and if we forget that there is a God, something profoundly human in us will be lost. #Quote by Thomas L. Friedman

#171. The seeds of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public. #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#172. When you are a child at home alone, you're afraid someone might come; when you are old and at home alone, you're afraid no one will come. #Quote by Ljupka Cvetanova

#173. I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference."
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, (from "Mates") #Quote by Edith Pearlman

#174. If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him. #Quote by Criss Jami

#175. Speaking of happiness, those distinctive moments are found outdoors – in the fall, in the winter and always in the mountains where people are few, wildlife is abundant and there is peace in the quiet. #Quote by Donna Lynn Hope

#176. We are given over to absolute solitude. No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us; we must take it upon ourselves, each of us must take it upon himself. #Quote by Jacques Derrida

#177. You are alone because you were born alone. And though you were born alone, you found a reason and the strength to shake yourself, though as helpless as you were at birth, for the whole universe to hear and know that you have not just arrived, but you are healthy, and you commended and moved things and people around you with your cry, even as an infant! And though it all seems you are alone, note that once you can breathe, you are never alone! Smile, for there is an indomitable power within you, given to you by God! Realize your God, realize your power! Awake and realize your true strength and the strong power within you! Face life and do not just challenge the challenges in life but conquer them with all boldness and fortitude. Step by step, complete the steps! It is always not all that easy, but, be strong and beat life no matter what! #Quote by Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#178. Whenever he had spoken of love, she had spoken of love's brief duration. 'A year, or even two months from now, you won't love me anymore.' Josée was the only person he knew who had a real consciousness of time. Everyone else, including himself, was driven by some very fundamental instinct to try, or pretend, to believe that love could last and solitude be dispelled forever. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#179. Oh! why was I born with a different face? why was I not born like the rest of my race? when
I look,each one starts! when I speak, I offend; then Im silent & passive & lose every friend. Then
my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, my person degrade & my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; all my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. Im either too low or too highly prized; when elate I m envy'd, when meek Im despis'd #Quote by William Blake

#180. I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself. #Quote by Iris Murdoch

#181. Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?
The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell. #Quote by Jeffrey Eugenides

#182. A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude. #Quote by Mason Cooley

#183. My father was the church organist; the village curate was my mother's brother, a former monk from the order of Pijar, a very well-educated and ascetic man who loved nothing but solitude. #Quote by Wladyslaw Reymont

#184. I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. #Quote by Alice Munro

#185. Aside from what it teaches you, there is simply the indescribable degree of peace that can be achieved on a sailing vessel at sea. I guess a combination of hard work and the seemingly infinite expanse of the sea - the profound solitude - that does it for me. #Quote by Billy Campbell

#186. I have always been considerably addicted to my own company. #Quote by Siegfried Sassoon

#187. We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing. #Quote by Gore Vidal

#188. Thus, discipline is the creation of boundaries that keep time and space open for God. Solitude requires discipline, worship requires discipline, caring for others requires discipline. They all ask us to set apart a time and a place where God's gracious presence can be acknowledged and responded to. #Quote by Henri J.M. Nouwen

#189. What if I told you that if you simply mix starlight, solitude, silence and softness, you may just learn everything you've ever needed to know about everything you hadn't known? #Quote by Victoria Erickson

#190. [...] not knowing what he was doing because he did not know where his feet were or where his head was, or whose feet or whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial rumbling of his kidneys and the air of his intestines, and fear, and the bewildered anxiety to flee and at the same time stay forever in that exasperated silence and that fearful solitude. #Quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#191. My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression. #Quote by Sue Monk Kidd

#192. Distance means so little, when life means so much. #Quote by Amit Kalantri

#193. Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else's snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It's world-creating.

It's raw, exposed dreaming. It's humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next.

It's what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience. #Quote by Laurie Perez

#194. To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do. #Quote by Victor Hugo

#195. The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness. #Quote by Emil Cioran

#196. It is a much wiser policy to plant acre after acre of orchids and lead one's life in solitude encompassed by their sheltering stems, than to surround oneself with the hoi polloi and so court the same pointless misanthropic disgust as befell Timon of Athens. Society is forever holding forth about fairness and justice. If it really believes these to be of such importance, it might do well to kill off a few dozen petty criminals per day, and use their carcasses to fertilize and give life to countless fields of flowers. #Quote by Soseki Natsume

#197. In my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of understanding unless someone explains it to you. #Quote by Knut Hamsun

#198. There is an assumption, put forth by everyone from greeting card companies to Bruce Springsteen, that nobody likes to be alone, least of all women. But many women, long valued in context to their relations to other people, find solitude- both the act of being alone and the attitude of being independent- a surprisingly sweet relief. #Quote by Rebecca Traister

#199. As a general rule, teenage girls never, ever see solitude as a choice. #Quote by Alice Pung

#200. How difficult it is to find solitude in a world that constantly demands your attention. #Quote by Joyce Rachelle