“Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.”
― Ester Buchholz (1933-2004)
“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
― Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)
“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
― Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron (1788-1824)
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
“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 (1817-1862)
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
“There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned”
― Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)
“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”
― Albert Camus (1913-1960)
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne (1533-1599)
“However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.”
― Michael Foley
“Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.”
― Omar Khayyám (1048-1131)
“It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.”
— Anthony Storr (1920-2001)
"If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears."
— Anthony Storr (1920-2001)
"Imagination flourishes best in solitude."
— Anthony Storr (1920-2001)
“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”
— Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”
—Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.”
― Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
"The thoughtful soul to solitude retires."
— Omar Khayyám (1048-1131)
“Solitude Deprivation:
A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.”
― Cal Newport
“It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether.”
― Cal Newport
"Without great solitude no serious work is possible"
—Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours!”
― William Wilberforce (1759-1833)