SOLITUDE QUOTES II
quotations about solitude
Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.
MOLIERE
The Misanthrope
Alone ... The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
The Heart's Journey
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
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Pale Fire
Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The Broken Wings
I praise the Frenchman; his remark was shrewd,-- "How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude." But grant me still a friend in my retreat, Whom I may whisper--Solitude is sweet.
WILLIAM COWPER
Retirement
Solitude does not consist in living alone; it consists in living with others, with people who take no interest in you.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away ... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
Accepting, then, the years of solitude as perfectly inevitable, one must consider how to pass them, how to keep one's self occupied and amused.
CHARLES DICKENS
Household Words: A Weekly Journal
Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.
A. W. TOZER
Of God and Men
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. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
The silent virtues of a good man in solitude are more amiable than all the noisy honors of active life.
MARY FERRIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
This truth--to prove, and make thine own:
Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Isolation"
One may make a solitude in the depths of his own heart, in the midst of a dissipated and worldly life. He may also, when his isolation becomes oppressive, people that solitude with beings after his own heart, and adapted solely to his purposes.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Solitude is the mother of anxieties.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
Here's to the pain the light of the oncoming train
Come on ode to solitude in chains
H.I.M.
"Ode to Solitude"
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.
THOMAS MANN
Death in Venice
Whoever gives himself up to solitude, Ah! he is soon alone.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Wilhelm Meister
The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.
DORIS GRUMBACH
Fifty Days of Solitude
However much we value undemanding solitude, we still go on organizing our environment to make sure we don't get enough of it. Clearly, our attitude to solitude is more ambivalent than we like to let on.
JANE POLDEN
Regeneration: Journey Through the Mid-Life Crisis