1,686 Quotes About Solitude

Solitude is sometimes best society.

Solitude is sometimes the best society.

Every so often a disappearance is in order. A vanishing. A checking out. An indeterminate period of unavailability. Each person, each sane person, maintains a refuge, or series of refuges, for this purpose. A place, or places, where they can, figuratively if not literally, suspend their membership in the human race.

No one can help us to achieve the intimate isolation by which we find our secret worlds, so mysterious, rich and full. If others intervene, it is destroyed. This degree of thought, which we attain by freeing ourselves from the external world, must be fed by the inner spirit, and our surroundings cannot influence us in any way other than to leave us in peace.

There is nothing harder to come by than detachment and solitude; and nothing more important.

Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.

I am not a joiner. Somewhere I once said that people join clubs now for the very reason they once carried them, a need for security. Maybe I'm alone more often than I should be, because I try to find security within myself.

I chose the shadows; they did not choose me. I stay here securely not just because I feel plain, but because disappearance is by now the easy way. The habit. The worn path that I can trod knowingly and be assured safe passage home.

We come into the world alone. We go away the same. We're meant to spend the interlude between in closeness or so we tell ourselves. But it's a long way from the morning to the evening.