As a natural, personal, and essential mode of being, solitude has been described and appreciated in many ways throughout history. To complement the analyses of Part I and Part II, here is presented quotations by authors and public figures that collectively highlight the essence and value of solitude. Selected from a few different listings, these quotes on solitude are organized into themes and feature an emboldened phrase in each to indicate what I consider to be the central point of interest.
Rather than adding commentary to the quotes, I simply present them to highlight various aspects of solitude from different perspectives. They are selected with complete disregard to the authors’ character, ideology, and original context (which, with few exceptions, I’m not familiar with anyway) and are used here for their expression of concepts related to solitude. These quotes touch upon, and to varying extents capture, many aspects of life that, so expressed, engender a better conception of solitude than does modern culture.
Ultimately, this is a selection of distinct thoughts about solitude to stimulate one’s thoughts about solitude – ideally, in solitude – to assist a better understanding and appreciation of solitude from its inherent value to its current relevance.
Categories of Theme
Personal development through solitude
The difference between aloneness (solitude) and lonelineness
Why company cannot replace solitude
Character and solitude
Principles of being (in relation to solitude)
Philosophies of solitude
Experiences of solitude
Solitude in the modern world
Personal development through solitude
“The rudiments of a great character can only be formed in Solitude. It is there alone that the solidity of thought, the fondness for activity, the abhorrence of indolence, which constitute the characters of a hero and a sage are first acquired.”
– JG Zimmerman
“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
― Marcel Proust
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
― Harold Bloom
“Writing is a solitary pleasure. Reading is a solitary pleasure. Does this mean that the writer and the readers do not like humanity? On the contrary! Beyond time and space, beyond colors and customs, the writer and the readers share dreams, knowledge, hopes, imagination, and love of mankind.”
― Gabrielle Dubois
“But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more.”
― Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 11: January 1787 to August 1787
“Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meditations
“… 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. And love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.”
― Han Suyin, The Mountain Is Young
“What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. […] Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
“In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.”
― Laurence Sterne
The difference between aloneness (solitude) and lonelineness
“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
― May Sarton
“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. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”
― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
“How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy
“Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I’ve never minded about it.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
“Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.”
― Marty Rubin
Why company cannot replace solitude
“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.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“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
“Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.”
― Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself
“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, All About Love: New Visions
“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men…”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
“How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?”
― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God
“Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It’s terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can’t see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by, and nothing is done. It isn’t as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn’t: it’s just a waste.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
“Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains, secluded its happiness and far away in its compassion and hidden in its secrets and mysteries. […] Your life, my friend, is a residence far away from any other residence and neighbors. Your inner soul is a home far away from other homes named after you. If this residence is dark, you cannot light it with your neighbor’s lamp; if it is empty you cannot fill it with the riches of your neighbor; were it in the middle of a desert, you could not move it to a garden planted by someone else. Your inner soul, my friend, is surrounded with solitude and seclusion. Were it not for this solitude and this seclusion you would not be you and I would not be I.”
― Kahlil Gibran, Mirrors of the Soul
“We do not require company. In varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over. Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course, the rest of the world doesn’t understand.”
― Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto
“Everyone is “extremely nice”—and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis”).”
― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
“I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men — although the sum total of men’s learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.”
― Girolamo Cardano
“Everyone experiences the feelings of sadness and loneliness. We might rue our lack of companionship, but some people present a desperate need for aloneness. Being alone allows a person to think, imagine, and take in nature. Because being alone is essential for specific human actions, similar to all other aspects of life, it is a gift.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster
“Until you experience real loneliness, you shall never know what real loneliness is. So many people feel miserable and lonely just because they ignore their inner man, create a gap between themselves and their inner man, and neglect their true self!”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Character and solitude
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley
“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, LIFE Magazine, December 7, 1953
“I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference.”
― Greta Garbo
“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, Wuthering Heights
“There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
“Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.”
― Jean Rhys, Quartet
“But I need solitude–which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo
“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
― Rollo May
“The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; 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, Peace and Happiness
“Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,
When I have no engagements written on my block,
When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,
When no one comes to take me away from myself
And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,
A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,
Being so contrived that it takes too long a time
To get myself back to myself when they have gone.”
― Vita Sackville-West
“When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude”
― William Wordsworth
“Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.”
― Ingmar Bergman
“The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
“I have not a desire but a need for solitude.”
― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
“Introverts live in two worlds: We visit the world of people, but solitude and the inner world will always be our home.”
― Jenn Granneman, The Secret Lives of Introverts: Inside Our Hidden World
“Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.”
― Irvine Welsh, Skagboys
“…the dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others’ faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated, spurred on by provocation. The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it. He plays at it until he dies, except for the moments when he is alone and without a mirror. For the dandy, to be alone is not to exist. The romantics talked so grandly about solitude only because it was their real horror, the one thing they could not bear.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel
“Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn’t really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories
Principles of being (in relation to solitude)
“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, Essays and Aphorisms
“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone.”
― George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
“As soon as we are alone,…inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieities, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Making All Things New and Other Classics
“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
“Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.”
― Wayne Cordeiro, Leading on Empty: Refilling Your Tank and Renewing Your Passion
“We need solitude, because when we’re alone, we’re free from obligations, we don’t need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.”
― Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story
“A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.”
― Axel Munthe
“An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them […] No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.”
― H.P. Lovecraft
“As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”
― Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
“Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.”
― Natalie Goldberg
“In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen
“For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley On Love: Selected Writings
“Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
“One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments…is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is ‘dis-ease.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with “The Divine Presence”
“There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it’s why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.”
― Tobias Wolff
“It did not occur to me that absence of human companionship does not assure solitude. It may, on the contrary, plunge one into an environment compared with which New York or London would appear deserts. For we take memory and imagination with us. The seabirds that scream overhead or waddle along the margins of the surf; the grotesque forms of twisted cedars; the rustle of sea-grass in the wind; the interminable percussion of the breakers; the dead infinity of the sand itself – there can be no solitude, in the sense of freedom from disturbances of thought, in the presence of such things. They draw us back into the maelstrom. (“Absolute Evil”)”
― Julian Hawthorne, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
“Solitude, whether endured or embraced, is a necessary gateway to original thought.”
― Jane Hirshfield (American poet)
“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude.”
― Nikola Tesla (Inventor)
“The best thinking has been done in solitude.”
― Thomas A. Edison (American inventor)
“To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.”
― Joseph Krutch, ‘The Desert Year’
Philosophies of solitude
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
― Hermann Hesse
“Solitude sometimes is best society.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost
“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.”
― Ralph Emerson
“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. 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.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
“And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Aloneness is a gift. A beautiful gift to the human soul. True and consistent satisfaction comes from the bond you form with yourself. Nobody else is a constant”
― Mohadesa Najumi
“Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations
“The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.”
― Washington Irving
“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal
“She frowned at him. ‘You are in love with solitude.’
‘Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?”
― Meg Rosoff, The Bride’s Farewell
“In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
“hold company with yourself so sacred
that even when you are alone,
you are whole.”
― AVA., you are safe here.
“Solitude is where I place my chaos to rest and awaken my inner peace.”
― Nikki Rowe
“There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“Allow the heart to empty itself of all turmoil! Retrieve the utter tranquility of the mind from which you issued. Although all forms are dynamic, and we all grow and transform, each of us is compelled to return to our root. Our root is quietude.”
― Lao Tzu
“It’s no good trying to get rid of your aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.”
― Thomas Browne
“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
“I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.”
― May Sarton
“Connections are difficult. There’s an irritation in being among people who’ve already found their connection, and finding that those left who haven’t are just as undesirable as the void they would be replacing. The numbing mind-ream of knowing you’re alone not because people won’t accept you but because you find so little worth accepting. An imposed solitude is better than simply tolerating your company in waiting for something better. So loneliness is not such a terrible thing when you consider that the alternative to thought provoking solace is to be surrounded only by reminders of why that solitude is preferable.”
― Jhonen Vásquez
“To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.”
― David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
“What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
“We must do like the animals that rub out their traces at the entrance to their lairs. Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself. Retire into yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there; it would be madness to trust in yourself if you do not know how to govern yourself. … Borrow nothing except from yourself, arrest your mind and fix it on definite and limited thoughts, and rest content with them, without any desire to prolong life and reputation.”
― Michel de Montaigne (1533-92): On Solitude
“Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.”
― Albert Einstein
Experiences of solitude
“I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
― Albert Einstein
“Reading is solitude.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
“When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.”
― Antonio Porchia, Voices
“On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.
For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It’s not hungry. It’s neither warm or cold. It’s resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I’ve gone through make possible.
Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.”
― Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis
“When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.
Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired — though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
A compensating make-believe.
Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on — in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.
Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”
(Best Company)”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
“After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living,’ I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds…”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler
“Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world – there I am a child – there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance – I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child – Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish – every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will – I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet – I hope I am not here playing tricks ‘to make the angels weep’: I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled – Enough of this – though in your Love for me you will not think it enough.”
― John Keats
“Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one’s own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden
“But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861
“I am never less alone than when alone.”
― Cicero, ‘Cicero De Officiis’
“There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along….”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letters to a Young Poet’
Solitude in the modern world
“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
“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, Wilfrid Cumbermede
“It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
“People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“I think solitude is a really positive thing. I cherish solitude immensely. In today’s society, there’s so much pressure to communicate, eat out, be friends with people. Why can’t you read a book on your own? Why have you got to have a book club?”
― Nicky Wire
“Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy nor world-estranged mysticism his era demands, but a balance between quantitative and qualitative reality. Modern man, with his reduced capacity for intuitive perception, is unlikely to benefit from the contemplative life of a hermit in the wilderness. But what he can do is to give undivided attention, at times, to a natural phenomenon, observing it in detail, and recalling all the scientific facts about it he may remember. Gradually, however, he must silence his thoughts and, for moments at least, forget all his personal cares and desires, until nothing remains in his soul but awe for the miracle before him. Such efforts are like journeys beyond the boundaries of narrow self-love and, although the process of intuitive awakening is laborious and slow, its rewards are noticeable from the very first. If pursued through the course of years, something will begin to stir in the human soul, a sense of kinship with the forces of life consciousness which rule the world of plants and animals, and with the powers which determine the laws of matter. While analytical intellect may well be called the most precious fruit of the Modern Age, it must not be allowed to rule supreme in matters of cognition. If science is to bring happiness and real progress to the world, it needs the warmth of man’s heart just as much as the cold inquisitiveness of his brain.”
― Franz Winkler
“Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations
“We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.”
― Storm Jameson
“When I was a kid I used to disappear into the woods all day. Now I can walk in the wilderness without wasting my valuable time. As I hike along I can call anyone in the world, schedule an appointment, take a picture of me standing next to a tree and then send the person a map so he or she can join me there. Solitude has been snuffed out.”
― David Skibbins, Eight of Swords
“The world is a loud talker but a very poor thinker. It lives on words — very poor food, — and on noises, –very poor music. It does not understand that solitude is the home of great thoughts and aspirations.”
― Abram J. Ryan, A Crown for Our Queen
“Our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence. And I feel that we need a lot more wonder and a lot more silence in our lives.”
― Fred Rogers (American television host)
“Now, more than ever, we need our solitude. Being alone gives us the power to regulate and adjust our lives. It can teach us fortitude and the ability to satisfy our own needs. A restorer of energy, the stillness of alone experiences provides us with much-needed rest. It brings forth our longing to explore, our curiosity about the unknown, our will to be an individual, our hopes for freedom. Alone time is fuel for life.”
— Dr. Ester Buchholz
“People who need people are threatened by people who don’t. The idea of seeking contentment alone is heretical, for society steadfastly decrees that our completeness lies in others.”
— Lionel Fisher, ‘Celebrating Time Alone: Stories of Splendid Solitude’
Stepping Stones 