Solitude Quotes

For me and for thousands with similar inclinations, the most important passion of life is the overpowering desire to escape periodically from the clutches of a mechanistic civilization. To us the enjoyment of solitude, complete independence, and the beauty of undefined panoramas is absolutely essential to happiness.

Bob Marshall

L.A. is the ultimate anonymous city: except when you choose not to be, you are generally alone. New Yorkers are never alone. It's surprising that street crime happens here at all, since muggings and rapes require solitude for the proper intimacy between criminal and victim, and in New York you have to go looking for a genuinely deserted block of street. Furthermore, whereas at night it can get dark in some parts of L.A., New Yorkers are never without light, at least the artificial kind.

David Klinghoffer

The secret of solitude is that there is no solitude.

Joseph Cook

To seek solitude like a wild animal. That is my only ambition.

Dalai Lama

The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.

Thomas Edison

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.

C.G.Jung

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

Vladimir Nabokov

Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.

James Russell Lowell

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best thinking has been done in solitude.

Thomas Alva Edison

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

Thomas de Quincey

The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.

Omar Khayyam

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

May Sarton

Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.

Paul Tillich

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.

Voltaire

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

Robert Cecil

Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.

Robert Browning

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

Octavio Paz

I owe my solitude to other people.

Alan Watts

Solitude vivifies; isolation kills

Joseph Roux

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

Miguel de Unamuno

Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.

Paul Brunton

The whole value of solitude depends upon one's self; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it

John Lubbock

Solitude is often the best society

Proverb