Solitude

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.

Believe me, friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.

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

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

The solitary speaks."One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being.

A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.

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.

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.

Man loves company—even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals . . . he seeks to establish a relationship.

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

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

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

Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company.

Who hears music, feels his solitude Peopled at once.

Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.

Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able . . . to keep myself company.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.