quotations about solitude
I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Factotum
Today, more than ever, we need to recognize that the gift of solitude is not ordered to the acquisition of strange contemplative powers, but, first of all, to the recovery of one's deep self, and to the renewal of an authenticity which is presently twisted out of shape by the pretentious routines of a disordered togetherness.
THOMAS MERTON
Contemplation in a World of Action
I cannot endure the horror, the evil, which comes to self in solitude.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, May 8, 1811
How very dreary and unwelcome are hours of solitude to the sensualist, the libertine, and the ignorant person.
J. W. BARKER
attributed, Day's Collacon
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Columbus
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.
HONORE DE BALZAC
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Honore de Balzac
The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization has been kind. But there are the multitudes to whom civilization has given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right foregone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in the case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the nearly refined. These has the movement of the world thronged together into some blind by-way. Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed. They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their kingdoms they are ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they own for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no obscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closed corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command so much. For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how to wish.
ALICE MEYNELL
"Solitude", The Spirit of Place and Other Essays
In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention. If we could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace