top of page

"You must suffer me to go my own dark way."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Solitude quotes

"I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented."

"O solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, Than reign in this horrible place."

"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden."

"I inhale loneliness like it is the sweet smell of virgin earth conquered by fiery rain drops. Within me, I'm a thousand others."

"I have often wished in vain, ' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.'That, ' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us."

"That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."
Explore more quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson


"No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."


"At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion."


"The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine."
bottom of page