Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Solitude.
It is God who lets the wild apples grow, to satisfy the hungry. He showed her a wild apple-tree, with the boughs bending under the weight of the fruit. Here she took her midday meal, placing props under the boughs, and then went into the darkest part of the forest. There it was so still that she could hear her own footsteps, as well as the rustling of every dry leaf which bent under her feet. Not one bird was to be seen, not one ray of sunlight could find its way through the great dark boughs of the trees; the lofty trunks stood so close together that when she looked before her it appeared as though she were surrounded by sets of palings one behind the other. O, here was solitude such as she had never before known!
Hans Christian Andersen, The Wil
Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.
Ovid
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! it seems to say, there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and So
Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.
Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Pa
Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream.
Roger Rosenblatt, The Man in the
He who lives in solitude may make his own laws.
Publilius Syrus, Moral Sayings
To fly from, need not be to hate, makind: All are not fit with them to stir and toil, Nor is it discontent to keep the mind Deep in its fountain.
Lord (George Gordon) Byron, Chil
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, 196
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, 19
The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.
LouisFerdinand Celine
Go away, I'm all right!
H. G. [Herbert George] Wells
Thus weary of the world, away she hies,And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aidTheir mistress mounted through the empty skiesIn her light chariot quickly is convey'd;Holding their course to Paphos, where their queenMeans to immure herself and not be seen.
William Shakespeare
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.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais
Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.
Samuel Johnson
One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict -- girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.
Lord Percival
We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Willia
The right to be alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.
Louis D. Brandeis
