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Life without a friend is death without a witness.
-Proverb
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To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
-Joseph Addison
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It is God who lets the wild apples grow, to satisfy the hungry. He showed her a wild apple-tree, with the boughs bending under the weight of the fruit. Here she took her midday meal, placing props under the boughs, and then went into the darkest part of the forest. There it was so still that she could hear her own footsteps, as well as the rustling of every dry leaf which bent under her feet. Not one bird was to be seen, not one ray of sunlight could find its way through the great dark boughs of the trees; the lofty trunks stood so close together that when she looked before her it appeared as though she were surrounded by sets of palings one behind the other. O, here was solitude such as she had never before known!
-Hans Christian Andersen
The Wild Swans
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We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
-Maya Angelou
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He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
-Aristotle
Politics
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Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
-Francis Bacon
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Man was formed for society and is neither capable of living alone, nor has the courage to do it.
-William Blackstone
Commentaries on the Laws of England
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A writer who writes, I am alone... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.
-Maurice Blanchot
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The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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The higher we rise, the more isolated we become; all elevations are cold.
-Boufflers
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The right to be alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.
-Louis D. Brandeis
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Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily.
-Arthur Brisbane
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No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.
-Jackson Browne
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Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
-Pearl Buck
To My Daughters, with Love (1967)
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In solitude, where we are least alone.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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To fly from, need not be to hate, makind:
All are not fit with them to stir and toil,
Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1818
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Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
-Albert Camus
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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.
-Emily Carr
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Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
-Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock, 1931
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Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.
-Robert Cecil
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The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine
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I see nothing for you on this earth but that field which I once christened 'Briars;' go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you.
-William Ellery Channing
Letter to Henry David Thoreau, March 1845
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Books about Solitude
