Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood.
Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
And for this you must have quiet and solitude. But society does not allow you to have them. You must be with people, outwardly active at all costs. If you are alone you are considered antisocial or peculiar, or you are afraid of your own loneliness.
Haughtiness lives under the same roof with solitude.
There is no solitude in nature.
I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.
Maybe love won't let you down. All of your failures are training grounds and just as your back's turned, you'll be surprised. . . as your solitude subsides.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.
I like my solitude, and I'm a strong-willed person; I'm a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.
Isolation breeds conceit.
We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart. . . and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together. . . . I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.
Maybe solitude is best had in the midst of multitudes.
Where now is Britain?. Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks were stood her capitols, and hears The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks From the dismaying solitude.
In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence
A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.
Our age is so gregarious that there is at present a marked prejudice against anyone being alone. It is looked down on, and a need to be alone is almost considered a fault, a weakness, as though if one cannot endure - more - enjoy being with other people every minute one is aloof, unreal, and somehow to be pitied.
I needed to be in the bush. There I find solitude and beauty and purity and focus. That's where my heart lies.