Solitude Quotes

A writer who writes, I am alone... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

Maurice Blanchot

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.

Bertrand Russell

What call thou solitude? Is not the earth with various living creatures, and the air replenished, and all these at thy command to come and play before thee?

John Milton

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.

Karl Kraus

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

Albert Einstein

I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,if there were not a friend?The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.

Karl Marx

Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily.

Arthur Brisbane

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

Aldous Huxley

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

Anton Chekhov

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Edward Dahlberg

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

Eric Hoffer

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

Sydney Smith

The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.

Omar Khayyam

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, Lonesome Traveler

It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized to come between a man and his Maker.

Charles Eastman