Solitude Quotations

Quotes regarding solitude.

The earth is a beehive; we all enter by the same door but live in different cells.
- African proverb

He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
- Sir Francis Bacon

Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
- Sir Francis Bacon

He never is alone that is accompanied with noble thoughts.
- Beaumont and Fletcher, Love's Cure (1647)

Who knows what true loneliness is — not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
- Joseph Conrad, in Under Western Eyes (1911), Pt. I, Ch. 2

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the migtiest of agencies; for solitude is essential. All come into this world alone; all leave it alone.
- Thomas De Quincey

It is simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is, to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to solitude.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Transcendentalist

This is that which we call Character, — a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart; which is company for him, so that such men are often solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not need society, but can entertain themselves very well alone.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Character

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.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience

When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
- Epictetus, Discourses

For 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

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
- Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

Solitude, the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself-is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be seperated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition.
- Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
- May Sarton

When everything has left you, you are alone; when you have left everything behind, there is solitude.
- Schiller from the song "Solitude"

The chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little joy he takes in other people's company.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.
- Laurence Sterne

All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.
- Han Suyin

Solitude is the mother of anxieties.
- Publilius Syrus, Moral Sayings (1st c. B.C.)

We are rarely proud when we are alone.
- Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764)

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.
- Carl Gustav Jung

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
- Albert Einstein

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