Quotes About Solitude

Each time I reach outside my skin/I just get lonesome for what's within.

What had been quiet and restful was now silent and empty.

In winter when the snow and ice were fierce, we shook beneath our different roofs alone, and that's what Hell is like, I think. It's cold and shame and shaking. And worst of all, it's loneliness.

This is what I think, in essence, prayer is. It is the breaking of silence. It is the need to be known and the need to know. Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness.

I am not angry with anybody. But when I am alone it seems to me that I can see my friends in a clearer and rosier light than when I am with them; and when I loved and felt music best I lived far from it. It would seem that I must have distant perspectives in order that I may think well of things.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.

I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.

Friedrich Hölderlin

I'm building a grave for my heart, that it may rest; I spin a cocoon around myself, because everywhere it's winter, in blissfull memories I wrap myself against the storm.

My solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.

I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.

The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it, if there were not a friend? The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, "society", inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—"base.

I and me are always too deeply in conversation.

Loneliness is one thing, solitude another: you have learned that - now!

In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

O Solitude! You are my home, Solitude!

What do you plan to do in the land of the sleepers? You have been floating in a sea of solitude, and the sea has borne you up. At long last, are you ready for dry land? Are you ready to drag yourself ashore?