Solitude Quotes

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

Winston Churchill

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?

Albert Einstein

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

Pablo Picasso

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

Goethe

The best thinking has been done in solitude.

Edison

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.

Voltaire

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.

Einstein

A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.

Rumi

Solitude isn’t loneliness. Solitude is when the entire serene universe seems to surround and hold you quietly.

Victoria Erickson

Loneliness is to be avoided, solitude is to be sought.

Tom Hanks

Society is no comfort, to one not sociable.

Shakespeare

Solitude, in these days as much as ever, is an absolute necessity.

Leo Babauta

Solitude is like punctuation. A paragraph without periods and commas would be exhausting to read.

Arnie Kozak

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Maya Angelou

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

Thoreau

Once you know how to take care of yourself, company becomes an option.

Keanu Reeves

Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.

Goethe

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude.

Nikola Tesla

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Emerson

Solitude is the place of purification.

Martin Buber

Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.

Marty Rubin

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone.

Thoreau

Solitude is a lost art in these days of ultra-connectedness.

Leo Babauta

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

Edward Gibbon

I am never less alone than when alone.

Cicero

A well-ordered mind is at home with solitude.

Stoic Emperor

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

Bertrand Russell

I myself am best when least in company.

Shakespeare

In proportion as a person simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude.

Thoreau

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till the other is ready, and it may be a long while before they get off.

Thoreau

In solitude

What happiness? Who can enjoy alone,

Or all enjoying, what contentment find?

John Milton

People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.

Karl Lagerfeld

Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It 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 Tillich

Fall in love with your solitude.

Rupi Kaur

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

Bell Hooks

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Goethe

I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.

Emily Bronte

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.

George Mac Donald

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

Thoreau

A lonely day is God's way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.

Criss Jami

My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.

A S Byatt

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

Thoreau

My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women.

Einstein

Solitude is dangerous. It’s very addictive. It becomes a habit after you realise how peaceful and calm it is. It’s like you don’t want to deal with people anymore because they drain your energy.

Jim Carrey

Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.

Thoreau

It is better to be alone than in bad company.

I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more.

Thomas Jefferson

It would do the world good if every person would compel himself to often be alone. Most of the world’s progress has come from such.

Deepak Chopra

I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.

Emerson

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.

Wayne Dyer

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

Franz Kafka

This great misfortune – to be incapable of solitude.

Jean de la Bruyère

Solitude is a kind of freedom.

Umberto Eco

He who understands humanity seeks solitude.

Ali ibn Abi Talib

Fire is a good companion for the mind.

May Sarton

Be alone and be happy with yourself.

Leo Babauta

I’m not anti-social. I’m pro-solitude.

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

Edward Gibbon

All of humanity’s problems stem from mans inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal

I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude…I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind.

Benjamin Franklin

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

Wendell Berry

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.

May Sarton

Solitude sometimes is best society.

John Milton

Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.

Joseph Roux

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.

Leonardo da Vinci

I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what the X represents I don’t really know…but it’s a substantial ratio.

Glenn Gould

Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.

Balzac

Make the time to be alone. Your best ideas live within solitude.

Robin Sharma

Talent is nurtured in solitude… A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Goethe

Solitude is the soul’s holiday.

Katrina Kenison

Solitude is a good place to visit but a poor play to stay.

Josh Billings

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

Gabriel García Márquez

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

Epicurus

Find time each day to be alone, for your mental health, by stealing pockets of time from other areas of your life.

Leo Babauta

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.

Pearl S Buck

Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn’t have to be a lonely kind of thing.

Fred Rogers

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

Sartre

Our perpetually networked selves cling to constant communication in an effort to avoid the deep-seated sense of loneliness we so dread.

Maria Popova

One of the best gifts we can give ourselves is time alone with God.

Joyce Meyer

Give solitude a chance. You’ve got nothing to lose. And your life to gain back.

Joshua Becker

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

Robert Cecil

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.

Joshua Slocum

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

Patricia Highsmith

The more you enjoy solitude, the simpler life becomes.

Maxime Lagacé

Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.

Nikola Tesla

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.

Thoreau

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

Laurence Sterne

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.

Lorraine Hansberry

You only grow when you are alone.

Paul Newman

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more

Byron

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Thoreau

I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I refuel.

Audrey Hepburn

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Arthur Schopenhauer

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

Albert Camus

Cherish your solitude.

Eve Ensler

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Thoreau

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

Virginia Woolf

Who hears music, feels his solitude

Peopled at once.

Robert Browning

Solitude sometimes is best society.

John Milton

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

Emerson

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

C S Lewis

Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Camus