80 quotes about Solitude



To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
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Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
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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.
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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.
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The higher we rise, the more isolated we become; all elevations are cold.
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The right to be alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.
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Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily.
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No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.
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This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.
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In solitude, where we are least alone.
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Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
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Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.
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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.
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If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.
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Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
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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.
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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
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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.
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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.
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We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
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I'm still the little southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who really didn't feel like she belonged.
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The best thinking has been done in solitude.
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I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
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Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.
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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.
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Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.
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We walk alone in the world.
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We never touch but at points.
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Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.
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The good and the wise lead quiet lives.
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I want to be left alone.
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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?
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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.
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In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. Tibullus by all means use sometimes to be alone.
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True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.
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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.
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A man by himself is in bad company.
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Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
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The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
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Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.
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If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.
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Solitude is un-American.
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Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel --or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime.
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O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings
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The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.
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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.
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Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
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A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
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Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
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Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.
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To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self.
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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.
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Two Paradises t'were in one, to live in Paradise alone.
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In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.
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An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
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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?
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Solitude begets whimsies.
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Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.
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One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict -- girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.
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Life without a friend is death without a witness.
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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.
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If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.
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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.
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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.
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The strong man is strongest when alone.
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A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
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Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
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One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
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In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.
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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.
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I have never found a companion so companionable as solitude.
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I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
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If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
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Solitude is the despair of fools, the torment of the wicked, and the joy of the good.
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May God be gracious to each lonely one who walks in silence towards the setting sun.
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You have already failed if you need a lot of inspectors.
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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.
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Go away, I'm all right!
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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.
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