solitude quotes

Alfred North Whitehead: 

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

C.S. Lewis: 

Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.

Gertrude Stein: 

When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.

Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber]: 

...love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other. 
b. 1917 Chinese writer and physician 


Henry David Thoreau: 

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Jessamyn West: 

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

May Sarton: 

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

Pearl S. Buck: 

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 S. Buck: 

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Simone Weil: 

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.

Thomas Merton: 

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.