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Solitude Quotes
"If I were to envy any persons on this planet, it would be mountain hermits. You often hear old platitudes such as, 'Speak out. Be heard.' On the contrary, a breath of fresh air would be something like: 'Silence, think for at least 15 minutes, and then maybe speak out."
4
"I...think it much more supportable to be always alone, than never to be so."
4
"You must suffer me to go my own dark way."
4
"In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again."
4
"At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed."
4
"All geniuses are peculiarly inclined to solitude, to which they are driven as much by their difference from others as the inner wealth with which they are quipped, since among humans, among diamonds, only the uncommonly great are suited as solitaires: the ordinary ones must be set in clusters to produce any effect."
4
"She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her."
4
"I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough."
4
"Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection."
4
"And now if you'll excuse me, I should like to finish my book, alone, without the presence of a single ringleted girl to disrupt me. If you should come for me at dinner and find me in my chair, gone to the angels at last, you shall know that I died alone, which is to say in a state of utter bliss."
4
"It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place."
4
"And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it."
4
"While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace."
4
"There is a magic in walking alone, in thinking alone: If there is no one to contact you around, the universe starts contacting you!"
4
"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."
4
"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."
4
"The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together."
4
"When you want to be alone, even few people around you will seem like a tremendous crowd to you!"
4
"All the quiet corners of the world are the great temples for the wise and for the wisdom!"
4
"And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself; that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity."
3
"I've always liked the moonless night best. It's easier to say things in the dark. It's easier to be yourself."
3
"So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down."
3
"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."
3
"His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless ..."
3
"Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself."
3
"I'm still lonely and it's a glorification of something I'm not finished with. I don't want to be distracted from my work by other people, but the absence of it all distracts me from my work and that's why I run towards the city, to get a little glimpse of it."
3
"Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed."
3
"You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you're the house where people come and go as they please, because you're simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn't let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You're still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn't have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert."
3
"This great misfortune - to be incapable of solitude."
3
"Aloneness is the presence of oneself, solitude is the presence of God."
3
"When you are lonely for a while don't get restless, if you had born alone, you are going to die alone then for sometime you can certainly live alone."
3
"It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them."
3
"The psyche of some people, whether through innate structure or via adaption to personal experiences, is uniquely adept for absolute aloneness."
3
"Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful - as if the finite were for a second infinity - as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity - as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty."
3
"There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."
3
"Hide in the morrow. No one will look for you there."
3
"Je fais mon lit et mon ménage; I seek my dinner in a restaurant; my supper takes care of itself; I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering, poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom a will and testament not to be disputed has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven."
3
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