Best 1398 quotes in «solitude quotes» category

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.

Humans are all too happy to keep company until the company turns out to be less appealing than solitude.

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

I am 23 and I am learning what it means to be an artist, for I am not an artist, because it takes life and a life lived well, to the limit, to see the patterns in storms, but I am 23 and I am learning. I am learning shame and solitude, forgiveness and goodbyes. I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day, and you must build your own.

I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and doubly, trebly so, for her.

I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.

I am finding out gradually why I am so lonely. The only things I care about are things which use my brain. The women I meet are not so much interested and I do not meet many men, so there is an intellectual solitude which is like the solitude of the desert — dangerous to one's sanity.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations".

. . . I am in my hermitage perhaps 70 to 80 percent of the time. I relish and enjoy time with others. I have been called "the sociable hermit." Ironically, lengthy solitude often invokes a verbal avalanche when I find myself with a dear and treasured friend, or at a rare social occasion. . . . Solitaries, I suppose, are not always introverts.

I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower...I live still a collegiate student...and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world...aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all.

I am so tired. I have grown old from being serious. I have grown ill from being serious. I want to laugh at myself. I want to forget myself. I am so tired.

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make every moment holy. I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action; and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to be a mirror for your whole body, and I never want to be blind, or to be too old to hold up your heavy and swaying picture. I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. and I want my grasp of things to be true before you. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood, like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother, like a ship that carried me through the wildest storm of all.

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.

I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breaths and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.

I can’t help you, I can only guide you, and you are the one who can help yourself.

I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration than those which I now enjoy. I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning. The only drawbacks to this solitude are the want of information on the progress of scientific discovery in Europe and the lack of all the advantages arising from an interchange of ideas.

I choose solitude over cold kisses. If it isn't love, it is poison.

I come here for the solitude. I come to soak myself in memories before they evaporate, before they float so far from my memory that I can't catch them.

I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end.

I covet solitude and storms…and rain, with its geography of dark silence and distance

If a man should ascend alone into heaven and behold clearly the structure of the universe and the beauty of the stars, there would be no pleasure for him in the awe-inspiring sight, which would have filled him with delight if he had had someone to whom he could describe what he had seen. Nature abhors solitude.

I don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.

If anyone's ever told you there's peace in solitude, they haven't been alone for a very long time.

I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

I fear that moments of quietude are on the endangered list; right behind solitude.

If everyone could spend some time self analysing, spend some quiet time with nothing to do and nowhere to go, then without a doubt the world would be an infinitely better place to live and play. It would probably be the cause of the end of bullying, teen suicide, anxiety, depression, stress, and fear and the start of a more genuine and authentic world. I have found that my tranquillity and peacefulness grew significantly stronger as I began to live comfortably with my desires and cravings.

I felt I could turn the earth upside down with my littlest finger. I wanted to dance, to fly in the air and kiss the sun and stars with my singing heart. I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company.

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

If I'm all alone, then the standard for sanity is up to me entirely.

If I exist, then surely there must be someone else out there like me.

I find beauty in sadness, and peace... and a mystery waiting to be solved.. the more you unfold the mystery, the more you are mesmerized by the layers of mystery lying underneath.. and solitude becomes the perfect company for sadness.. but again, the feeling you get when you realize you're not alone gives you inexplicable happiness.. and there's satisfaction in happiness,, and another mystery which is unknotted yet difficult to penetrate

I find that there is no speech that is not soliloquy. And yet, always, I sense an audience.

If I can not have the most brilliant destiny, I want the most wretched, not for the purpose of a sterile solitude, but in order to achieve something new with such rare matter.

I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable.

I find myself in the moment of solitude.

If man will understand the real essence of staying in the solitude with his Maker alone, he will never spend all his time with the crowd always

If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.

If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!

If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him. The lie was a way of buying protection.

If you are in the mountains alone for some time, many days at minimum, & it helps if you are fasting. The forest grows tired of its weariness towards you; it resumes its inner life and allows you to see it. Near dusk the faces in tree bark cease hiding, and stare out at you. The welcoming ones and also the malevolent, open in their curiosity. In your camp at night you are able to pick out a distinct word now and then from the muddled voices in creek water, sometimes an entire sentence of deep import. The ghosts of animals reveal themselves to you without prejudice to your humanity. You see them receding before you as you walk the trail their shapes beautiful and sad.

If solitude feels painful, it's only because we don't know how to be alone.

If we can't have world peace, I'll settle for a quiet room.

If you are lonely, you feel separated from everybody. If you are in solitude, you feel you are in contact with the entire universe.

If you ever desire to give birth to anything at all, then you cannot do without solitude.

If you can’t stay alone with yourself, you will lose yourself! Keep yourself in yourself by creating a time for yourself!

If you can't write, read. If you can't read, walk. Or walk and read, then write.

If you feel all damp and lonely like a mushroom, find the thick, creamy soup of joyfulness and just dive into it in order to make life tastier