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What we do is a solitary endeavour - a distillation of our own mind, of our own talent, of our own feelings, and a ripping open of the gut to bear the fruit of our 'art womb.' (Treza Bordinat Ager)
A very young painter is seldom alone. If he is an art student, he is in an art school with other students. He does not yet know that one day he will have to face himself as a solitary creature enclosed in a space of four walls... and that he will have to be a self-propelled being, with no one at is side. (Pierre Alechinsky)
Of course, when one is faced with a canvas, one is no longer alone, and the sense of solitude diminishes. This can be an agreeable passage of time. In fact, solitude then becomes a kind of companion. (Pierre Alechinsky)
Most people have never known solitude... But there are a few of the other kind who can go back to their rooms anywhere and close the door on the whole world, and feel that they need never emerge. (Louis Aragon)
The urge, ability and vision to create is a solo endeavor. (Linda Archinal)
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god. (Aristotle)
...if you want to be a little bit solitary and work very hard, you can do it more easily in New York than in a town like Paris or London. Because you depend so much for human relationships here on the phone. If you don't answer your phone, you are quite a lonely couple. (Arman)
Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul. (Marcus Aurelius)
You can't hear your thoughts, your voice, without solitude. (Leo Babauta)
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. (Sir Francis Bacon)
Isolation has become part of my identity. The moment I started to feel that my simplest rights were snatched away from me in Gaza, the besieged city I live in, I decided to abandon the world to create my own. (Nidaa Badwan)
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. (James Baldwin)
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine. (Honore de Balzac)
An ivory tower is a fine place as long as the door is open. (Darby Bannard)
I don't know that I spent any more time alone than any other kid, but being by myself never bothered me. (Joseph Barbera)
Solitude. Only in intimate communion with solitude may man find himself. Solitude is good company and my architecture is not for those who fear or shun it. (Luis Barragan)
Next to a shot of some good, habit-forming narcotic, there is nothing like travelling alone as a 'builder-upper.' (Robert Benchley)
The only time a man thinks is when he's alone. (Jose Bergamin)
True solidarity is only possible among the solitary. (Jose Bergamin)
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form. (John Berger)
Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude. (Ingmar Bergman)
All alone by the telephone. (Irving Berlin)
I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. (Wendell Berry)
Sometimes people who are never alone are the loneliest, don't you think so? (A. I. Bezzerides)
alone, adj. In bad company. (Ambrose Bierce)
Every thing that lives / Lives not alone nor for itself. (William Blake)
The most important habit is solitude, quiet time. People who enter their day by taking 45 minutes or an hour for themselves - meditation, prayer, inspirational reading, taking a walk - before they go for it in the real world do best. (Kenneth Blanchard)
I paint with other painters all the time but my real study time is alone. I think it is necessary for a painter to be out in the elements alone to concentrate and think. (Linda Blondheim)
Solitude and quiet are highly desirable, but the lack of them is no barrier to writing... The will to work builds all the seclusion that one needs. (John Braine)
I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself. (Emily Bronte)
The human animal did not evolve on a solo flight. We are social creatures. The rugged individualists could not exist without the village or the clan, which they often scorn. (Peter William Brown)
Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself. (Thomas Browne)
Solitude is the place of purification. (Martin Buber)
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. (Pearl S. Buck)
How many have found solitude, not only, as Cicero calls it, the pabulum of the mind, but the nurse of their genius! How many of the world's most sacred oracles have been uttered, like those of Dodona, from the silence of deep woods! (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
In solitude the passions feed upon the heart. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world. (Anthony Burgess)
And to get the work done that I must do, one has to work in isolation and not be readily disturbed... I don't have daily newspapers, and I like to feel when I get up in the morning my attention is fixed on the work I am going to do. (Reg Butler)
In solitude, where we are least alone. (Lord Byron)
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone. (Lord Byron)
It is important from time to time to slow down, to go away by yourself, and simply Be. (Eileen Caddy)
The main reason for the solitude to work is because people won't shut up when they're around, which makes it hard to hear yourself imagine. (Gail Caduff-Nash)
Please walk alone and send your love and your kisses to guide me. (Sammy Cahn)
Solitude matters, and for some people, it's the air they breathe. (Susan Cain)
-New York Times. January 15, 2012...
Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. (Susan Cain)
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion. (Thomas Carlyle)
It's like the code of living by yourself. People who are single know what I'm talking about. You eat standing up, reading the paper. Or you say to yourself, this isn't even cutting it, I'm taking a TV dinner and I'm getting in bed here. (Mary Chapin Carpenter)
Testing oneself is best when done alone. (Jimmy Carter)
-Journey to the End of the Night...
I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude. (Louis-Ferdinand Celine)
If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain. (Paul Cezanne)
People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share. (Anton Chekhov)
To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions. (Deepak Chopra)
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong. (Winston Churchill)
It may say a lot about postmodern sensibilities to think that art is best made in solitude. Many of our great classical artists had helpers in an atelier type setting. (Beverly Claridge)
To be creative you must create a space for yourself where you can be undisturbed... separate from everyday concerns. (John Cleese)
Amid those scenes of solitude... the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things. (Thomas Cole)
Alone, alone, all alone, / Alone on a wide, wide sea! (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that 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. (Sidonie Gabrielle Colette)
Living alone makes it harder to find someone to blame. (Mason Cooley)
Living alone is good for privacy, bad for full-scale cooking and moving heavy furniture. (Mason Cooley)
Alone, I am satisfied with myself. With others, I am beset by troubling comparisons. (Mason Cooley)
Alone, I am drunk on my thoughts; in company, I am sober again. (Mason Cooley)
I was originally going to get up today and be a part of all this; instead I'm going to just stay right here - in my own skin... (Kris Courtney)
In solitude... one can think and feel deeply without interruption. I have definitely grown far closer to myself rather than to others because I see my quiltmaking as my experience which has nothing to do with other people. (Nancy Crow)
If you're alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
I must have the personal dialogue, the private time, with each painting in progress. I can't share it with anyone until it's done. (Ken Danby)
Art starts alone – and convinces society later. (Douglas Davis)
I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life. (Edgar Degas)
It seems to me that today if the artist wishes to be serious... he must once more sink himself in solitude. (Edgar Degas)
The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer. (Eugene Delacroix)
The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life. (Eleonora Duse)
It's easier to be me than someone else. But just like most famous people, I just want to be left alone most of the time. (Bob Dylan)
Some people prefer solitude. They say their peace of mind depends on this. Others say they would be better off in church. If you do well, you do well wherever you are. If you fail, you fail wherever you are. Your surroundings don't matter. (Meister Johann Eckhart)
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. (Albert Einstein)
It is better to be alone than in bad company. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The isolation of being in my studio capsule underground is like being in bed, pulling the covers over my head and shutting out the rest of the world. (Shirley Erskine)
On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching. (Jeffrey Eugenides)
There is something to be said for going alone; you don't have to keep regular hours. (Peter Ewart)
Word I was in my life alone, / Word I had no one left but God. (Robert Frost)
Out alone in the winter rain, / Intent on giving and taking pain. (Robert Frost)
Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together. (Neil Gaiman)
It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone. (Paul Gauguin)
And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it. (Paul Gauguin)
Artists with serious aspirations need to be left alone to follow the course of their own imagination. (Robert Genn)
The older I grow, the more I find myself alone. (Alberto Giacometti)
Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius. (Edward Gibbon)
When all is said, the greatest action is to limit and isolate one's self. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone. (Vincent van Gogh)
If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing. (Glenn Gould)
Alone in my room, I could settle so easily into the solace of things and stare at them for hours. (Philip Graham)
I love and in a way need, a private secret place. It's a kind of deep obsession, but I also love to need and be with friends and the two things often need to be together... it's a painful conflict that will never be smoothly resolved. (Morris Graves)
If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party. (Dag Hammarskjold)
The loner may be respected, but he is always resented by his colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them, when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself. (Sidney Harris)
It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation... My work requires it - but I myself have no need or use for it - Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative - I think all chrysalides do - all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion - resurrection - the establishment of the entity. But now I've come up to the outside of my casements. (Marsden Hartley)
I was cut off from the world. There was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original. (Joseph Haydn)
Creativity needs the company of creativity. An artist alone is an artist struggling... (Sandra Taylor Hedges)
The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. (Ernest Hemingway)
Solitude is independence. (Hermann Hesse)
It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate. (Jenny Holzer)
Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (Edmond Jabes)
Anyway, solitary people interest me. There are so many different ways of being solitary. (Tove Jansson)
- The True Deceiver...
It was simply that she was only fully alive when she devoted herself to her singular ability to draw, and when she drew she was naturally always alone. (Tove Jansson)
If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle. (Samuel Johnson)
Being an artist is being an isolated individual. (Asger Jorn)
Mountain Sahyadri has shared my pains and pleasure since childhood. I have loved being alone, questioning myself and the universe, talking to nature, taking mountain walks, being a part of the cosmos. (Jyotsna Kadam)
You should draw in silence, alone, in your room, in the distance from others... they don't cheer up you. (Lusine Sonja Karagashyan)
I'd rather be home alone, painting. (Margaret Keane)
- Lonesome Traveler...
After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living,' I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds... (Jack Kerouac)
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer. (Barbara Kingsolver)
If you're a painter, you're not alone. There's no way to be alone. You think and you care and you're with all the people who care, including the young people who don't know they do yet. Tomlin in his late paintings knew this, Jackson Pollock always knew it... (Franz Kline)
It can be frightening to spend 5 weeks alone in a cabin in the wilderness. I was able to collect my thoughts and worked a lot - because I couldn't do anything else. (Wanda Koop)
-on Jackson Pollock...
With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication. (Lee Krasner)
-Aloneness Is Not Loneliness / The Book of Life
Aloneness is obviously not isolation, and it is not uniqueness. To be unique is merely to be exceptional in some way, whereas to be completely alone demands extraordinary sensitivity, intelligence, understanding. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
There is no such thing as living alone, for all living is relationship; but to live without direct relationship demands high intelligence, a swifter and greater awareness for self-discovery. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
-misattributed, from Life's Little Instruction Book by H. Jackson Brown, Jr. ...
Spend some time alone every day. (Dalai Lama)
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone: However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards... (Philip Larkin)
-A Home for the Soul...
A place of solitude offers a retreat from the opposing forces and diverse demands of living, an entry into a state of peace and unity. Mind and body can retire from confusion and conflict to a sanctuary of clarity and harmony. (Anthony Lawlor)
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. (James Russell Lowell)
The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere. (James Russell Lowell)
The whole value of solitude depends upon one's self; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it. (John Lubbock)
Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying. (Martin Luther)
Mastering the art of aloneness doesn't mean living in isolation or never needing the love, support, and involvement of others. It means creating and living a life in which you feel whole and content as an individual on your own; a life in which you can take care of yourself emotionally and financially. (Lauren Mackler)
The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves. (Shirley MacLaine)
We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them. (Maurice Maeterlinck)
I spent a week up north at the cottage by myself. It freaked me out. It's dark up there. (Mary Jean Mailloux)
Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended. (Eric Maisel)
The great omission in American life is solitude... that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures which are the incinerator of the spirit. (Marya Mannes)
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think. (Marshall McLuhan)
Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. (Thomas Merton)
I became a loner. I became a mountain man. A lot of those things are very good qualities and they help you do your work, help you be singular and keep the artistic integrity of your work intact, but they don't make it very easy to live your life. (John Milius)
Solitude is rich but seldom hilarious. (Stephanie Mills)
My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions. (Claude Monet)
One's better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one's own. In fact it's a terrible business and the task is a hard one. (Claude Monet)
It is the wild and untamed... that pulls at my heartstrings, rather than the picturesque. Being on my own on a beach or hillside is a break from demands and... raises my sanity levels no end. (Clare Money)
A career is born in public - talent in privacy. (Marilyn Monroe)
Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict. (Jim Morrison)
The most dramatic conflicts are, perhaps, those that take place not between men but between a man and himself - where the arena of conflict is a solitary mind. (Clark Moustakas)
I am often asked if I am not lonely on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer. (John Muir)
As a child I was often drawing when other children were playing outside. The time I spent alone taught me to enjoy my own company, an attribute which is desirable when choosing a career in art. (Kathryn Mullaney)
There is no insurmountable solitude. (Pablo Neruda)
Being alone is not the same as being lonely. Loners are not survivors in the modern interpretation but have always been dominantly active in the creation of culture throughout the course of time. (Leonard Niles)
No two loners are alike, but have only one thing in common: they just simply love being alone. (Leonard Niles)
Sitting alone at night in secret study; / it is placed on the brass tripod. / A slight flame comes out of the emptiness and / makes successful that which should not be believed in vain. (Nostradamus)
Solitude is the furnace of transformation. (Henri Nouwen)
I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
I'm the most gregarious of men and love good company, but never less alone when alone. (Peter O'Toole)
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded. (Mary Oliver)
Aloneness is the presence of oneself. Aloneness is very positive... You are so full of presence that you can fill the whole universe with your presence and there is no need for anybody. (Osho)
And yet my life seemed to be just one big mass of people. I would never ask some people in for tea to fill up time. I just never would do it. Whenever I seemed to have a quiet hole, I would paint. That was what I would choose to do to fill up the time. (Myfanwy Pavelic)
I realized... that the artist is always alone. Early in life I had thought I needed other people to confirm or approve what I was doing... (Beverly Pepper)
Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me. (Fernando Pessoa)
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave. (Fernando Pessoa)
Truly, from a very early age, I started distancing myself from other kids, not out of willingness, but just out of the nature of my energy. I liked to do things solely, and I already had a taste of the quest for perfection, which is unusual in a little kid. (Philippe Petit)
Because I cannot work except in solitude, it is necessary that I live my work and that is impossible except in solitude. (Pablo Picasso)
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use. (Ezra Pound)
Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone. (Thomas de Quincey)
Go it solo? A psyche doesn't need that. It needs love of exploring one's own view to see how it unfolds, but it also needs to perceive that there is an abundance of inspiration from all... humans and otherwise. (Elle Collier Re)
Being anti-social may be cause or result. (Norman Ridenour)
Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. Your solitude will be a support and a home for you. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
It is as commendable to think well of oneself when alone, as it is ridiculous to speak well of oneself among others. (Francois de La Rochefoucauld)
Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves and where they dream. (Roger Rosenblatt)
Solitude vivifies; isolation kills. (Joseph Roux)
- Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto...
We do not require company. In varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over. Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course, the rest of the world doesn't understand. (Anneli Rufus)
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy. (Salman Rushdie)
May the time alone be as superbly filled with awe as the time of breaking bread with those whose hearts understand ours. (Linda Saccoccio)
After two years of being alone in the forest [Amazon], I was just one more animal. It was the time I started to draw and to paint, and of course photography... started to evolve in a very clear way. (Diego Samper)
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude. (Carl Sandburg)
The value of solitude – one of its values – is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression... (May Sarton)
Be able to live alone, even if you don't want to and think you will never find it necessary. (Marilyn vos Savant)
Solitude gives you the ideas and the motivation to make you want to collaborate. (Nitin Sawhney)
The strong man is strongest when alone. (Johann Friedrich von Schiller)
The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy. (Peter Schjeldahl)
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
I don't really see many people... don't really go anywhere either. (Martin Scorsese)
Isolation can lead to uniqueness, but uniqueness also walks the halls of mental institutions. (Winston Seeney)
You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room... All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you'll be quite a lot! (Dr. Seuss)
Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude. (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Solitude is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life... (Freya Stark)
It is very easy to love alone. (Gertrude Stein)
Solitude without togetherness deteriorates into loneliness. One needs strong roots in togetherness to be solitary rather than lonely when one is alone. (David Steindl-Rast)
The surest way to be alone is to get married. (Gloria Steinem)
A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert... gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture? (Rudolf Steiner)
One can acquire everything in solitude except character. (Stendhal)
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
He who lives in solitude may make his own laws. (Publilius Syrus)
I was a loner, am a loner, good Lord, it's the only way I can imagine working. (Dorothea Tanning)
The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think... Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. (Nikola Tesla)
I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. (Henry David Thoreau)
-in first century BC...
In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. (Albius Tibullus)
The only way I can live in this world is to live in a world of my own. (Robert R. Toth)
A person is a person through other persons; you can't be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships. (Desmond Tutu)
To be isolated is a fine thing and we are then nearer to nature. (John H. Twachtman)
Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude. (Miguel de Unanimo)
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. (John Updike)
We require our independence in order to grow and follow the direction that only we can direct. On an island we might be left alone. We are sequestered in our ivory tower of insular productivity. (Moustapha Venne)
The painter or draftsman ought to be solitary, in order that the well-being of the body not sap the vigour of the mind. (Leonardo da Vinci)
If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. (Leonardo da Vinci)
We are rarely proud when we are alone. (Voltaire)
I just love the idea of going into a room and creating something by myself. (Diane Warren)
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything. (Alan Watts)
To leave or disassociate from society in order to find one's true place in the world is the ultimate act of responsibility. When we can be true to our own inner calling and follow a path that takes us away from society, there is the inevitable return. With this return we bring back a deeper sense of purpose and the unique gifts that might only be found in the desert of self-discovery. (Jerry Wennstrom)
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. (David Whyte)
I like to find myself alone, not because I don't want to be around people, but because I experience my world differently when I'm by myself. (Randy Wiens)
Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all. (Oscar Wilde)
But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone. (Thornton Wilder)
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. (Tennessee Williams)
In solitude, we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us. (Virginia Woolf)
When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign in solitude. (William Wordsworth)
For oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude. (William Wordsworth)
Just when you think you are alone on the beach, you discover those aren't your own footprints. (Judith Wray)
I love isolation. It's very important for me to have time and space to myself when I can sit and read or write as well as paint. It's all part of the process. (Stuart Pearson Wright)
I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit... (William Butler Yeats)
I search for solitude, and within that search I find 'me.' (Miles Patrick Yohnke)
By all means use some time to be alone. (Edward Young)
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