"Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination
Silently the senses abandon their defences
Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendour
Grasp it, sense it, tremulous and tender
Turn your face away from the garish light of day
Turn your thought away from cold, unfeeling light
And listen to the music of the night

Music of the Night "
— Phantom of the Opera

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god."
— Aristotle

"Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine."
— Honoré de Balzac

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

"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you."
— Harold Bloom

"In solitude, where we are least alone. "
— George Gordon Byron

"Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"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."
— Colette (Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes)

"To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world."
— Anthony Burgess (Homage to QWERTYUIOP)

"I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the
room was like sunlight to me."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

".... there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along...."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
— Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

"Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness."
— George MacDonald

"The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write."
— Marguerite Duras (Writing)

"He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once."
— Robert Browning

"I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next. "
— Henry David Thoreau

"The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable."
— Karl Kraus

"Consider A Move

The steady time of being unknown,
in solitude, without friends,
is not a steadiness that sustains.
I hear your voice waver on the phone:

Haven't talked to anyone for days.
I drive around. I sit in parking lots.
The voice zeroes through my ear, and waits.
What should I say? There are ways

to meet people you will want to love?
I know of none. You come out stronger
having gone through this? I no longer
believe that, if I once did. Consider a move,

a change, a job, a new place to live,
someplace you'd like to be. That's not it,
you say. Now time turns back. We almost touch.
Then what is? I ask. What is?"
— Michael Ryan (New and Selected Poems)

"What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you."
— Charles Baxter (El Festin Del Amor)

"In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone."
— Rollo May

"Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude."
— Mary Shelley

"And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night."
— John Burroughs (Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Natural World of John Burroughs)

"A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"... an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"Anything we fully do is an alone journey."
— Natalie Goldberg

""What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?"
~Hedda Gabler in the play "Hedda" (sequel to "Hedda Gabler")"
— Henrik Johan Ibsen

"We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us."
— (Margaret) Storm Jameson (1891-1986)

"What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?"
— Kathy Acker (My Mother: Demonology)

"Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough."
— John Keats

"He thought about his people without sentimentalily, with a strick closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated the most."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there."
— Elizabeth Bowen

"Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me."
— Heather King (Parched)

"Michael wasn't on the pool deck, which was hard for me. None of my old Coral Springs teammates were around. Still, that old plane of cement felt like home. I folded my clothes and put them on the bench. I placed my water bottle under my starting block, and I dove in. Once again, I felt that ultimate state of transition, my feet no longer on the ground, my hands not yet in the water."
— Dara Torres (Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams At Any Stage In Your Life)

"Tu as tout à apprendre, tout ce qui ne s'apprend pas: la solitude, l'indifférence, la patience, le silence. Tu dois te déshabituer de tout: d'aller à la rencontre de ceux que si longtemps tu as côtoyés, de prendre tes repas, tes cafés à la place que chaque jour d'autres ont retenue pour toi, ont parfois défendue pour toi, de traîner dans la complicité fade des amitiés qui n'en finissent pas de se survivre, dans la rancoeur opportuniste et lâche des liaisons qui s'effilochent."
— Georges Perec (Un homme qui dort)

"Tu n'as rien appris, sinon que la solitude n'apprend rien, que l'indifférence n'apprend rien: c'était un leurre, une illusion fascinante et piégée. Tu étais seul et voilà tout et tu voulais te protéger: qu'entre le monde et toi les ponts soient à jamais coupés. Mais tu es si peu de chose et le monde est un si grand mot: tu n'as jamais fait qu'errer dans une grande ville, que longer sur quelques kilomètres des façades, des devantures, des parcs et des quais.
L'indifférence est inutile. Tu peux vouloir ou ne pas vouloir, qu'importe! Faire ou ne pas faire une partie de billard électrique, quelqu'un, de toute façon, glissera une pièce de vingt centimes dans la fente de l'appareil. Tu peux croire qu'à manger chaque jour le même repas tu accomplis un geste décisif. Mais ton refus est inutile. Ta neutralité ne veut rien dire. Ton inertie est aussi vaine que ta colère."
— Georges Perec (Un homme qui dort)

"It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"One must learn an inner solitude, wherever one may be."
— Meister Eckhart

"Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that Jose Arcadio Buendia was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"La solitude à deux est l'enfer consenti."
— Michel Houellebecq (The Possibility of an Island)

"'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart. "
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

""Nie ma nic osobliwszego, drażliwszego niż stosunek ludzi, którzy znają się tylko oczyma, którzy co dzień, ba, co godzina się spotykają, obserwują się i przy tym przez przymus zwyczaju czy własne widzimisię zmuszeni są zachowywać obojętną obcość bez pozdrowienia i słowa.
Unosi się między nimi niepokój i przewrażliwiona ciekawość, histeria niezaspokojonej, nienaturalnie tłumionej potrzeby poznania się i kontaktu, a również rodzaj sztywnego szacunku. Gdyż człowiek kocha i szanuje człowieka, dopóki nie może go osądzić, i tęsknota jest wynikiem niedostatecznej znajomości""
— Tomasz Mann/ Thomas Mann - Śmierć w Wenecji/Der Tod in Venedig

"I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below."
— Jean Giono (An Italian Journey)

"He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul. "
— Isabel Allende (Zorro)

".... it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting..."
— Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Reverie)