Quotes on Solitude

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

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

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

Apply yourself to solitude. One who is given to solitude knows things as they really are.

Solitude is the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter.

To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.

Something of the hermit's temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.

One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.

There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.

A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.

There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.

Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.

The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won.

Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Stephen Blackpool fall into the loneliest of lives, the life of solitude among a familiar crowd. The stranger in the land who looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it, is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces daily, that were once the countenances of friends