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Solitude
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“... I can easily do without people (there are days when I could easily do without myself), and ... in the country of books where I dwell, the dead can count entirely as much as the living.”
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“There are times when solitude, like starvation, is necessary to get rid of one's poisons.”
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“... solitude was still essential to him. He couldn't tolerate twenty-four hours in which the greater part wasn't spent entirely alone.”
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“In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.”
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“For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves. The great omission in American life is solitude ... ”
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“Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray.”
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“The world today does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone. ... Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse. 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!”
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“Solitude is separate experience. ”
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“Even the contemplative life is only an effort ... to hide the body so the feet won't stick out.”
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“ No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.”
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“There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.”
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“No one can help us to achieve the intimate isolation by which we find our secret worlds, so mysterious, rich and full. If others intervene, it is destroyed. This degree of thought, which we attain by freeing ourselves from the external world, must be fed by the inner spirit, and our surroundings cannot influence us in any way other than to leave us in peace.”
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“Avoid the reeking herd, / Shun the polluted flock, / Live like that stoic bird, / The eagle of the rock.”
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“ If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.”
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“... she was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company ... ”
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“... solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.”
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“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”
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“ There is a wilder solitude in winter / When every sense is pricked alive and keen ... ”
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“At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.”
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“... solitude / Is not all exaltation, inner space / Where the soul breathes and work can be done. / Solitude exposes the nerve, / Raises up ghosts. / The past, never at rest, flows through it.”
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“Solitude swells the inner space / Like a balloon. / We are wafted hither and thither / On the air currents. / How to land it?”
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“Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.”
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“One must always get away to taste experience. One must always escape from people one loves in order to love them. Isn't it queer?”
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“I simply adore being alone — I find it a consuming thirst — and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.”
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“One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.”
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“Alone time is when I recharge and go back to my center, distancing myself from the voices of the world so I can hear my own with clarity.”
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“... solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company ...”
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“Solitude is un-American.”
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“Solitude begets whimsies ...”
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“We learn about others when we are with them; when we are alone and silent we discover things about ourselves.”
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“Puttering is really a time to be alone, to dream and to get in touch with yourself. ... To putter is to discover.”
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“In solitude, we're liberated to be the persons we truly are ...”
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“Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You become an addict. ... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day's tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one? ”
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“I understand hermits, but not people who can't understand hermits.”
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“The prohibition against solitude is forever. A Carry Nation rises in every person when he thinks he sees someone sneaking off to be alone. It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.”
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“Alone, alone, oh! We have been warned about solitary vices. Have solitary pleasures ever been adequately praised? Do many people know that they exist?”
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“Solitude, like a drug, can be addictive. The more you have it, the more you want it. ”
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“... when the opportunity for solitude must be stolen, as for the most part it must in large families or even in small families of one husband and one wife, it is, like stolen fruits, very sweet.”
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“Was Thoreau never lonely? Certainly. Where do you think writing like his comes from? Camaraderie?”
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“Perhaps burglars are solitaries, and theft is only a sideline with them. The real high comes not from the money or the tape recorders, but from being alone where they ought not to be.”
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“Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.”
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“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.”
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“A room of one's own isn't nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one's own.”
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“The true solitary ... will feel that he is himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life.”
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“Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.”
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“Work cannot convey the almost voluptuous sweetness of the feelings experienced ... in solitude.”
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“The Soul selects her own Society — / Then — shuts the Door — / To her divine Majority — / Present no more — .”
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“The Soul's Superior instants / Occur to Her — alone — / When friend — and Earth's occasion / Have infinite withdrawn — ...”
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“The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.”
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“She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.”
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“... Solitude, like some unsounded bell, / Hangs full of secrets that it cannot tell ...”
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“... this passionate yearning for solitude, so necessary to genius yet so difficult to obtain, is perhaps the very cause of the strange, irritable, cynical eccentricities of temper and manner so often observable in the priesthood of intellect.”
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“Solitude nourishes me, the world is timeless when I am alone.”
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“The problem is that Peter's idea of private time is being with me, and my idea of private time is being with me.”
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“... I think that an anthill is better than a nest ... that in the anthill among a hundred thousand or a million you are freer than in a nest, where all sit around and look at one another, waiting until scientists finally discover ways to make us mind readers. ... the psychology of the nest is loathsome to me, and I always sympathize with one who flees his nest, even if he flees into an anthill, where it may be crowded but one can find solitude — that most natural, most worthy state of man, that precious and intense state of being conscious of the world and of oneself.”
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“My solitude begins in your arms.”
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“I have at last got the little room I have wanted so long, and am very happy about it. It does me good to be alone ...”
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“The best would be to have friends who came and went away; but if I had to choose between their never coming or never going away, I think I would choose that they do not come.”
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“Let them think I love them more than I do, / Let them think I care, though I go alone, / If it lifts their pride, what is it to me / Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone.”
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“My peace, O my friends, is in solitude.”
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“Not to be alone — ever — is one of my ideas of hell, and a day when I have had no solitude at all in which 'to catch up with myself' I find mentally, physically and spiritually exhausting.”
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“Solitude causes us to write because it causes us to think.”
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“... there are days when solitude ... is a heady wine which 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.”
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“An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An artist requires the healing of time alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered. Art lies in the moment of encounter. We meet our truth and we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression.”
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“Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music.”
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“Loneliness is random; solitude is ritual.”
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“Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.”
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“There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inacccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.”
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“... all humans are frightened of their own solitude. Yet only in solitude can man learn to know himself, learn to handle his own eternity of aloneness.”
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“I wonder if living alone makes one more alive. No precious energy goes in disagreement or compromise. No need to augment others, there is just yourself, just truth — a morsel — and you.”
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“I feel most real when alone, even most alive when alone. Better to say that the liveliness of companionship and the liveliness of solitude differ, and the latter is never as exhausting as the former.”
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“Our age is so gregarious that there is at present a marked prejudice against anyone being alone. It is looked down on, and a need to be alone is almost considered a fault, a weakness, as though if one cannot endure — more — enjoy being with other people every minute one is aloof, unreal, and somehow to be pitied.”
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“[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.”
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“I believe in solitude broken like bread by poetry.”
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“Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.”
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“Solitude offers the greatest opportunity for the fine-tuning of our souls.”
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“I love to walk in lonely solitude & leave the bustel of the nosey town behind me & while I look on nothing but what strikes the eye with sights of bliss & then I think myself tronsported far beyond the reach of the wicked sons of men where their is nothing but strife & envying pilefring & murder where neither contentment nor retirement dweels but there dwels drunkenness.”
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“Aloneness, like life, becomes more interesting when you realize it's a present.”
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“What others regard as retreat from them or rejection of them is not those things at all but instead a breeding ground for greater friendship, a culture for deeper involvement, eventually, with them.”
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“I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.”
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“One of the keenest pleasures of solitude, she thought, was the freedom to indulge in dowdiness.”
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“... I am an incorrigible devotee to solitude, and am never so cheerful, I believe, or so unruffled by small difficulties as when I'm alone. There's a sort of obligation to be polite and pleasant to yourself when nobody else is round ...”
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“... solitude is an achievement.”
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“Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others.”
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“Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one.”
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“Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul.”
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“For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.”
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“The association between failure, loneliness, and solitude is so strong in our culture that people often find it difficult to believe that there are some who like being by themselves.”
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“Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.”
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“One does not find solitude, one creates it.”
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“Solitude is the thing without which one does nothing.”
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“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.”
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“As far as I’m concerned, the only thing sweeter than seeing a friend is that friend canceling on me.”
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