Quotes About Solitude

At bottom I hate all this pampering we give each other, the moment we learn that another is ill. Why shouldn't one enjoy his illness too? One gets ill sometimes just to be alone for a while. It's a way the body has of conquering the mind.

There are times when nobody can help you, not even the one you love. You have to be alone. You have to be ill, and wallow in your illness. Your soul needs it.

I smoke, get up, move about. I cannot bear my own company. I have not learned yet to replace introspection by thinking. I could meditate on Spengler, for instance, but in ten minutes I am again devouring myself.

I wonder if the life I am leading is a dream or a reality. I feel far away from everything and everybody.

Every other illness is understood, shared with other human beings. Not this one. It is mysterious and solitary, it is as ineffectual and unmoving to others as the attempted crying out of a mute person. Everybody understands hunger, physical pain, illness, poverty, slavery. But no one understands that this moment at which I crossed the street is more annhiliating than a concrete catastrophe. Anxiety is a woman screaming without a voice, out of a nightmare.

She was always storming alone, being angry alone, going through vast emotional upheavals in which he did not take part.

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.

I had forgotten I was alone; I sat there, waiting for nothing, oblivious to the time.

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.

What a melancholy day! I said. Aren't you bored? Not particularly. I am reading.

When one gets up there, out of sight of all culture, of all vegetation, of everything that reminds one of the avarice and stupidity of men, one feels inclined to shout, to sing, to laugh, to cry, to fly, to dive head foremost into the sky, or to fall on one's knees.

The need of showing myself to be confident and perfectly at ease, precisely when I am least so. Talked much too much, as I am inclined to do after a period of solitude, losing self-control; for I was aware that I was talking too much, but could not check myself. In order to speak well, I need to feel that I am being listened to.

Je voudrais mourir à présent, vite, avant d'avoir compris de nouveau que je suis seule.

Tennis is the loneliest sport

He thought of winter coming, how it's the only season that stays like it will never leave;

The fear of finding oneself alone – that is what they suffer from – and so they don't find themselves at all.

Why do I feel this alone? Basically, because I've always been alone. I've always been alone. And alone I'll be. It's about time I become aware of it and never forget it.

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you're by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone – as it seems to me – is in danger.

Despite everything, a balanced, independent, lonely way of life can give the peace that is vital. I must look for peace. I must start to do meditation seriously—there I go, thinking again in Italian terms —and Buddhism.

I am as a speck of dust in the sun, and not even so much, in this solemn, mysterious, unknowable universe.

Nothing tastes better than what one eats by oneself.

every one must have some solitary spot where he can be alone with his God.

it was as if everything conspired to keep him from prayer.