Quotes about solitude
page 2

“I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

“Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Way

“I have not a desire but a need for solitude.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Source: Mourning Diary

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: The Eternal Now

Pain, Sense, Loneliness

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

Page 159
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Lovers, Nature, Suffering

“Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.”

Pearl Cleage (1948) American novelist

Source: Deals with the Devil, and Other Reasons to Riot

Truth, Music, Coffee, Tea

“Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.”

Ian Fleming book The Spy Who Loved Me

Source: The Spy Who Loved Me

Lovers, Loneliness

“Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.”

Witold Gombrowicz book Ferdydurke

Source: Ferdydurke

Beauty

“More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Variant: He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a God.

God

“Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

Women

“Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known… then went crazy as a loon."

Lisa Simpson”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

World, Beauty, Hurt

“I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: La náusea

Life, Death, Idea, Suicide

“Give me solitude — give me Nature — give me again, O Nature, your primal sanities!”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Leaves of Grass

Nature

“A confession : solitude no longer hurt me.”

Mario Benedetti (1920–2009) Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet

Hurt

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Friendship, Housing

“This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Life, Peace, Night

“In solitude, we lose our loneliness.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Loneliness

“but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

Star, Reading

“One must learn an inner solitude, wherever one may be.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

Learning

“I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Sleep, Cry

“He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Thinking, Time

“Throwing herself into learning helped Miri ignore the painful chill of solitude around her.”

Shannon Hale Princess Academy

Source: Princess Academy

Pain, Learning, Help

“In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

God, Way

“Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Loyalty

“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“her spirits wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Silence

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Life, Holiday

“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) American writer

Love, Reading

“Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Men

“I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Dead

“Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.”

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) novelist from Dominica

Source: Quartet

Books

“I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

“Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer (2000).

Life, Secret, World

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening (1899)

Soul, Sea

“…. solitude is, more or less, an inevitable consequence.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”

Edward Abbey book The Monkey Wrench Gang

Source: The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

Freedom, Madness

“This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Peace

“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) French novelist and art critic

Source: Against Nature

Dreams, Idea, Reading, Night

“We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.”

Tamim Ansary (1948) Afghan-American author/public speaker

Source: West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper (2004)

People, World, Disappointment

“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.”

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) French writer and film director

Source: Writing

“Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover… or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?”

David Markson book Wittgenstein's Mistress

Source: Wittgenstein's Mistress

Personality

“i am a trickster who doesn't know solitude”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

“Both looked back then on the wild revelry… and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

“Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

Pain, Question, Silence

“because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Nobel lecture (8 December 1982) http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_nobel.html Variant: races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude Context: The most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune. On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possiblity. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

“I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.”

Julia Glass book Three Junes

Source: Three Junes

Joy

“Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

World, Thinking

“Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: Kino

Silence, Loneliness

“There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Pain, Suffering, Distant

“Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: The Eternal Now

Pain, Loneliness

“I don’t know about birds
nor do I know the history of fire.
But I believe that my solitude should have wings”

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) Argentinian poet

History, Bird

“I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Happiness, Pleasure, Appearance, Dead

“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Source: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Life, Truth

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"Self-Portrait" (1936), p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1UxYzuI2oQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false 1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950) Variant: I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Pain, Youth

“Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Source: Collected Poems

Support, Sea

“The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Source: Conversations With Nadine Gordimer

Madness

“I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Feeling

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapter 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=pgPWOaOctq8C&q=%22The+secret+of+a+good+old+age+is+simply+an+honorable+pact+with+solitude%22&pg=PA199#v=onepage Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Secret, Age

“And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusty reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened and he entered. The next performance in the theater of Grenouille's soul was beginning.”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Soul, Heart

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Source: Complete Prose of Marianne Moore

Loneliness

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

Men, Singing

“After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living,' I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds…”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Variant: I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
Source: Lonesome Traveler

Lie, Thinking, Grass

“Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like… I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

Cars, Feeling

“Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

World, Beauty

“Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.”

Jean Genet book Querelle of Brest

Source: Querelle of Brest

“The moon in all her immaculate purity hung in the sky, laughing at this world of dust. She congratulated me for my carefully considered maneuvers and invited me to share in her eternal solitude.”

Shan Sa book Empress

Source: Empress

World

“That is why I write - to try to turn sadness into longing, solitude into remembrance.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Sadness

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.”

Junot Díaz (1968) Dominican-American writer

People, Hope, Communication, Joy

“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”

Jonathan Franzen book The Corrections

Source: The Corrections

Problem

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Lonesome Traveler (1960)
Context: No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.

Life, Learning, Dependency, For Men

“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we arealone.”

George Gordon Byron Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Source: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Feeling

“I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.”

Bohumil Hrabal book Too Loud a Solitude

Source: Too Loud a Solitude

“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.”

Violette Leduc (1907–1972) French writer

Source: Mad in Pursuit

Music, Grass, Summer

“Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Thinking

“What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

Silence

“Wildness had never been a part of her life. Home, work, home, work. That's all her life had consisted of, really. She'd told Maddox that she'd been glad for her solitude, bu the truth was, there were times she'd been starved for touch. Any touch.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Night

Life, Truth, Home, Time

“… loneliness is not a function of solitude.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Loneliness

“Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Personality

“It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Silence

“He could have had his choice of any woman in the district. And he chose solitude. Not solitude – that sounds too peaceful. More like solitary confinement.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Peace

“As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”

Sigmund Freud Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

Source: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

Problem, Decision

“Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Pain

“Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.”

Sidney Sheldon Master of the Game

Source: Master of the Game

Loneliness

“She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.'
'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?”

Meg Rosoff (1956) American-British children's writer

Source: The Bride's Farewell

Love, World

“they simply never understand,
do they,
that sometimes solitude
is
one of the most beautiful
things
on earth?”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Beauty, Understanding

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) American literary critic and scholar

Pleasure, Reading

“Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. —ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL”

Clive James book Cultural Amnesia

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Source: Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques

People, Intelligence, Thinking, Time

“Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

“Books are solitudes in which we meet.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

Books

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Death

“Then, bidding farewell to The Knick-Knack, I went to collect the few personal belongings which, at that time, I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Source: Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels

Travel, Cats, Time, Personality

“Education…is a companion which no misfortunes can depress, no clime destroy, no enemy alienate, no despotism enslave: at home a friend, abroad an introduction, in solitude a solace, in society an ornament: it chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once a grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Though sometimes attributed to Addison, this actually comes from a speech delivered by the Irish lawyer Charles Phillips in 1817, in the case of O'Mullan v. M'Korkill, published in Irish Eloquence: The Speeches of the Celebrated Irish Orators (1834) pp. 91-92.
Misattributed

Education, Home

“He took his way to the abode of sacred Loyalty, seeking to discover her hidden purpose. It chanced that the goddess, who loves solitude, was then in a distant region of heaven, pondering in her heart the high concerns of the gods. Then he who gave peace to Nemea accosted her thus with reverence: "Goddess more ancient than Jupiter, glory of gods and men, without whom neither sea nor land finds peace, sister of Justice…"”
Ad limina sanctae contendit Fidei secretaque pectora temptat. arcanis dea laeta polo tum forte remoto caelicolum magnas uoluebat conscia curas. quam tali adloquitur Nemeae pacator honore: 'Ante Iouem generata, decus diuumque hominumque, qua sine non tellus pacem, non aequora norunt, iustitiae consors...'

Silius Italicus Punica

Book II, lines 479–486
Punica

Love, Men, God, Peace

“Tombed in the solid night of starless space;
From nearest living orb so far removed,
That light, of all material things most swift,
Myriads on myriads of earth's years must speed,
Ere the mere outskirts of that Stygian gloom,
If ever, it might reach,-at rest eterne,
Lies the cold wreck of an extinguished sun.
Prime glory once of all heaven's radiant host;
Body, for soul of purest light most fit-
'Tween its first darkening, and eclipse complete,
Streamed years which might eternity appear;
While into ether, like the particles,
Invisible, which are the breath of flowers,
The mighty bulk its softer elements
Still ever was exhaling. As when flesh
And sinew of earth's monster Mastodon,
By the slow wasting of the elements,
All are dissolved, and hard, enduring bones
Alone remain,- even so, of this immense,-
When, by the ocean waves of centuries,
Millions succeeding millions, worn away,-
The adamantine skeleton alone,
In darkness, silence, utter solitude,
A ruin for eternity, was left.”

Edwin Atherstone (1788–1872) British writer

Israel in Egypt, Book the First (1861)

Soul, Flowers, Light, Silence

Quotes about solitude page 2

Quotes about solitude
page 2