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.”
Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era
Balaustion's Adventure, line 323 (1871).
Source: The complete poetical works of Browning
“Solitude is the place of purification.”
Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian
“O Solitude! You are my home, Solitude!”
Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”
Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist
Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)
“Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.”
Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet
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.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer
“Winter solitude-
in a world of one colour
the sound of the wind.”
Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate
Source: Death in Venice and Other Tales
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois
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.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo
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
Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman
Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 128.
Other
Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi
Freedom (1908)
Source: Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes
“The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
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.”
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine
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.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
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
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
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.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
Source: In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke - A Soul History
“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate
Source: Death in Venice and Other Tales
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer
Proper Studies (1927)
Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
“To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.”
Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright
No. 4 (5 March 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)
W.B. Yeats book The Tower
V, st. 3 <br class="br">The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
Jules Verne book The Mysterious Island
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)
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
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.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer
Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Wednesday
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools
St. 6
Rugby Chapel (1867)
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher
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.”
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer
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
Virginia Woolf The Common Reader
"Montaigne" http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Woolf_Montaigne.html <br class="br">The Common Reader (1925)
“I don't like feeling lonely… but in solitude one can get to revalue many things.”
Alejandro Fernández (1971) Mexican singer
Interview with Myrka de Llanos
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
He replied, 'Well, if you won't, we can't go on.'
Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 19
Morrissey (1959) English singer
From "My gilded prison", interview by J. C. Panek, L'Indic magazine https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Indic_magazine (November 1997). <br class="br">In interviews etc., About love
John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom
John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist
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.
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist
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.
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist
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.
Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist and writer
Magic And Mystery In Tibet
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor
Source: "An Inventor's Seasoned Ideas", New York Times (8 April 1934)
Charles Bukowski book Factotum
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.
Octavio Paz book The Labyrinth of Solitude
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.”
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament
“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”
Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist
“In solitude, where we are least alone.”
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement
“And Vin liked solitude. When you're alone, no one can betray you”
Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer
Source: The Final Empire
