Solitude

Hell is other people.

Not only does democracy make everyman forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens to the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Dieu créa l’homme, et ne le trouvant pas assez seul, il lui donne une compagne pour lui faire mieux sentir sa solitude .

Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

In all directions stretched the great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions.

How can I die alone. Where will I be then who am now alone, what groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone?

The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

When you are alone you are all your own.

We shall die alone.

Adventure most unto itself The Soul condemned to be— Attended by a single Hound Its own identity.

The solitude of writing is … quite frightening. It’s close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

But there are moments which he calls his own,

 

Oh lonesome’s a bad place To get crowded into.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Life is the desert, life the solitude;

I stroke the beam of my lamp

Never less alone than when alone.

 

Then on the shore

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

Virtue could see to do what Virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom’s self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where, with her best nurse Contemplation, She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings.