“It's practically my subject, my theme: solitude and community; the weirdness and terrors of solitude: the stifling and consolations of community. Also, the consolations of solitude.”

“O Solitude! You are my home, Solitude!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

“In solitude she lived,
And in solitude built her nest;
And in solitude, alone
Hath the Beloved guided her,
In solitude also wounded with love. ~ 35”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

“It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal— be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever— human solitude will increase in direct proportion.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

“Never forget that solitude is my lot… I implore those who love me to love my solitude."

(, May 11, 1910)”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“Solitude has become my companion.”

Anni-Frid Lyngstad (1945) Swedish female singer

“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet