Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.
Albert Einstein
Man loves company even if it is only that of a small burning candle.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
Henry David Thoreau
I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind
Albert Einstein
Language… has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Johannes Tillich
I am afraid to show you who I really am, because if I show you who I really am, you might not like it–and that’s all I got.
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
Colette
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau
I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.
Antonio Porchia
Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
Henry David Thoreau
In solitude, where we are least alone.
We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart… and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together…. I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.
Helen Hayes
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts.
K.T. Jong
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other
Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.
Lorraine Hansberry
Solitude is often the best society
By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear.
George Herbert
Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition . . .
Only in quiet waters do thing mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
Hans Margolius
Sometimes when you’re really lonely, you really feel alive and you feel like you know who you are.
Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.
Robert Cecil
Lonely is a man without love.
The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.
Marya Mannes
What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.
In solitude, where we are least alone.
George Gordon
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that’s where I renew my springs that never dry up.
Pearl Buck
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it”
What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it – like a secret vice.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.
A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with “a sort of greedy enjoyment,” as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was “saturated with the bouquet of silence.”
Holbrook Jackson
Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.
With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
Eric Hoffer
One can acquire everything in solitude – except character.
When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death – ourselves.
Eda LeShan
Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.
I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.
Henry David Thoreau
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known… then went crazy as a loon.
Matt Groening
When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.
The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.
Voltaire
…love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.
William Penn
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.
Jack Kerouac
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
We visit others as a matter of social obligation. How long has it been since we have visited with ourselves?
Morris Adler
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.
Paul Tillich
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
John Muir
I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.
Marcus Aurelius
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky… a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
Victor Hugo
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you…. In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.
Ruth Stout
For those uneasy with the world, solitude is the only guarantee of confidence.
I owe my solitude to other people.
Alan Watts
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. Henry
David Thoreau