Solitude

In a crowd, on a journey at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

Alone and warming his five wits,

 

He clasps the crag with crookèd hands;

 

But there are moments which he calls his own,

 

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange. 1

 

Never less alone than when alone.

 

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.

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary

I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.

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

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.

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

I stroke the beam of my lamp

We shall die alone.

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife , it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

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

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!

Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—“base.

Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.