Solitude

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

He clasps the crag with crookèd hands;

 

I awoke, only to see that the rest of the world is still asleep.

While you are alone you are entirely your own master and if you have one companion you are but half your own, and the less so in proportion to the indiscretion of his behavior.

Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. What the budding artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude—and now and then a piece of red meat.

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.

Alone, alone, all, all alone; Alone on a wide, wide sea.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.

But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

The painter must be solitary. For if you are alone you are completely yourself, but if you are accompanied by a single companion, you are only half yourself.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Allone, withouten any compaignye.

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumor of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more.

I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand.

Which is the bliss of solitude.

Just when you think you’re on the point of release From loneliness, then loneliness swoops down upon you.

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

In a solitude of the sea

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,if there were not a friend?The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.