Solitude Quotes
Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.
Jane Gardam
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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Listen as the wind blows from across the great divide,Voices trapped in yearning, memories trapped in time.The night is my companion, and solitude my guide.Would I spend forever here and not be satisfied?And I would be the oneTo hold you down,Kiss you so hardI'll take your breath away.And after, I'd wipe away the tears,Just close your eyes dear.
Sarah McLachlan
Without great solitude no serious work is possible.
Pablo Picasso
Life is the desert, life the solitude;Death joins us to the great majority.
Edward Young
See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.
Francis Bacon
Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.
Aphra Behn
I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.
Mark Lazarevich Levi
My yearning is my cup, my burning thirst is my drink, and my solitude is my intoxication; I do not and shall not quench my thirst. But in this burning that is never extinguished is a joy that never wanes.
Kahlil Gibran
Solitude begets whimsies.
Mary Wortley Montagu
I am a bit of a solitude person - a solitary personality. I like being on my own. I don't have any major friendships or relationships with people.
Anthony Hopkins
Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
Octavio Paz
My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.
James Patterson
She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship-in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.
David Brin
I think I definitely like the solitude of golf.
Jason Day
Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
And now the solider toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. 'As far as the eye could reach,' wrote Carter, 'not an object of any kind or living thing was in sight. It stretched out before us- one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared with the ocean in its vastness.' The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. 'This is a terrible country,' railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, 'the stillness, wildness, and desolation of which is awful... Not a tree to be seen... and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.
S. C. Gwynne
This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.
Emil Cioran
We leave TVs on in our house. I listen to my record player constantly to just hear music. I'm really intrigued by this idea of solitude.
Katee Sackhoff