Quotes about Solitude

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!

It would not be hard to imagine that a happy hermit, living in isolation, might feel connected to everything in nature and all people on the planet and not be at all affected by a dearth of human neighbors.

If you believe in love, do you manifest it or just talk a lot? If you believe in compassion, in non-harming, in kindness, in wisdom, in generosity, in calmness, in solitude, in non-doing, in being even-handed and clear, do you manifest these qualities in your daily life? This is the level of intentionality which is required to keep your meditation practice vital

Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger.

Never less idle than when wholly idle, nor less alone than when wholly alone.

In solitude every fear, every longing, becomes exaggerated.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

There are times when we have had enough even of our Friends.

Be good and you will be lonely.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying..