1,686 Quotes About Solitude

Anything that occupies your mind is your occupation. For some people quarreling is an occupation. They fear losing it more than a job-goer fears losing job. Because emptiness of mind is scarier than emptiness of stomach.

Love is a gathering of minutiae. Stones, dirt particles, the waxing/waning light, goat’s milk, chamomile,and honey. I am learning the excruciating art of attention, my small gift of sight to the world. The wider the world, the smaller I seem. This smallness is relieving. Concerns, like the self, are pebbles to be tossed into the sea.

There are some very ancient souls stuck here. In their previous births, they have been everything other people are trying to be. In this birth, they can't figure out what they should do. Their interests change everyday. Or nothing interests them at all. Only a life of solitude can give them stability.

And it is significant that a country as sorrowful as ours should have so many and such joyous fiestas. Their frequency, their brilliance and excitement, the enthusiasm with which we take part, all suggest that without them we would explode.

Silence is never empty.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is the measure of what spirit there is. [...] In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and a respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from solitude to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known other than as a punishment for criminals.

Divide the constant tide and random noisiness of energetic flow, with conscious recurring moments of empty mind, solitude, gratitude and deep...slow...breathing. Of this, the natural law of self-preservation demands.