Quotes about solitude
A collection of quotes on the topic of solitude, life, world, use.
Best quotes about solitude
“Who hears music feels his solitude
Peopled at once.”
Balaustion's Adventure, line 323 (1871).
Source: The complete poetical works of Browning
“Solitude is the place of purification.”
“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”
Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)
“Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.”
Source: Lolita
“Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.”
Ibid.
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A solidão desola-me; a companhia oprime-me.
Quotes about solitude
“Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude.”
“Winter solitude-
in a world of one colour
the sound of the wind.”
Source: Death in Venice and Other Tales
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
Commonly misquoted, converted to imperative mood, as "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler".
Walden (1854)
“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
Act 10, sc. 4
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
Her entry in her diary when she left Pondicherry and on the tumultuous developments in the world for the War, quoted in "Diary notes and Meeting with Sri Aurobindo" and also in IV. Diary Notes And Meeting With Sri Aurobindo http://www.motherandsriaurobindo.org/Content.aspx?ContentURL=/_staticcontent/sriaurobindoashram/-04%20Centers/India/Pondicherry/Sri%20Aurobindo%20Society/Wilfried/The%20Mother%20-%20A%20Short%20Biography/007_Diary%20Notes%20and%20Meeting%20with%20Sri%20Aurobindo.htm, p. 21
Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 128.
Other
Freedom (1908)
Source: Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes
“The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Source: The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
“I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.”
Variant: 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.
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
Source: Walden
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
As quoted in Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990) by Sy Safransky, p. 42
“I love solitude but I prize it most when company is available.”
Source: In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke - A Soul History
“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”
Source: Death in Venice and Other Tales
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
Proper Studies (1927)
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
“To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.”
No. 4 (5 March 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)
V, st. 3
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
Malheur à qui est seul, mes amis, et il faut croire que l’isolement a vite fait de détruire la raison.
Part II, ch. XV
The Mysterious Island (1874)
Letter Nine (4 November 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
“Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself.”
Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Wednesday
St. 6
Rugby Chapel (1867)
106
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782)
“Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.”
La solitude est certainement une belle chose, mais il y a plaisir d'avoir quelqu'un qui sache répondre, à qui on puisse dire de temps en temps, que c'est un belle chose. (Solitude is certainly a fine thing; but there is pleasure in having someone who can answer, from time to time, that it is a fine thing.) —Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Dissertations chrétiennes et morales (1665), XVIII: "Les plaisirs de la vie retirée".
Misattributed
"Montaigne" http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Woolf_Montaigne.html
The Common Reader (1925)
“I don't like feeling lonely… but in solitude one can get to revalue many things.”
Interview with Myrka de Llanos
(179).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
He replied, 'Well, if you won't, we can't go on.'
Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 19
From "My gilded prison", interview by J. C. Panek, L'Indic magazine https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Indic_magazine (November 1997).
In interviews etc., About love
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII
Context: I have only one recourse, to remember and to believe. To hold on with all my strength to the memory of the tragedy of the Room.
I believe that the only thing which confronts the heart and the reason is the shadow of that which the heart and the reason cry for. I believe that around us there is only one word, the immense word which takes us out of our solitude, NOTHING. I believe that this does not signify our nothingness or our misfortune, but, on the contrary, our realisation and our deification, since everything is within us.
Death (1912)
Context: It is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we go beyond its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few accidents of our nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have felt everything the reverse way and taken pleasure in that which is now pain. We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from this that the genius of the universe is an outrageous tyrant, seized with a monstrous madness, and that it delights only in the torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulee whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but a trifle, a few papilla more or less to our skin, the slightest modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature, the silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an unequalled music, a divine light. It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvelous hope and perhaps an unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable event …
And, should they stand still one day, become fixed and remain motionless, it will not be that they have encountered calamity, nullity or death; but they will have entered into a thing so fair, so great, so happy and bathed in such certainties that they will for ever prefer it to all the prodigious chances of an infinity which nothing can impoverish.
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong we may go in the dark, whatever our efforts in the dark and the useless work of our hearts working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion. It is this sentiment that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.
Infinite Jest (1996)
Magic And Mystery In Tibet
Source: "An Inventor's Seasoned Ideas", New York Times (8 April 1934)
Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 17
Context: I got into bed, opened the bottle, worked the pillow into a hard knot behind my back, took a deep breath, and sat in the dark looking out of the window. It was the first time I had been alone for five days. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me. I took a drink of wine.
The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
Variant: Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Context: Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has 'invented' himself by saying 'no' to nature – consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”
“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”
“In solitude, where we are least alone.”
“And Vin liked solitude. When you're alone, no one can betray you”
Source: The Final Empire
Source: Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Solitude
