Quotes on Solitude

There is nothing worse than solitude. Solitude can help a man realize himself; but it destroys a woman

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

What do you plan to do in the land of the sleepers? You have been floating in a sea of solitude, and the sea has borne you up. At long last, are you ready for dry land? Are you ready to drag yourself ashore?

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

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.

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.

Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its course; a quiet conscience.

I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

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

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

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone.

I love not man the less, but Nature more.