One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
Carl Sandburg

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
Miguel de Unamuno

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich

People who abhor solitude may abhor company almost as much.
Mason Cooley

Reading takes solitude and it takes focus.
Augusten Burroughs

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.
Giacomo Leopardi

Silence and solitude are more distracting to me than chatter and commotion.
Marilu Henner

Solitude begets whimsies.
Mary Wortley Montagu

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.
Abraham Cowley

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
Sydney Smith

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.
Thomas Mann

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.
Liv Tyler

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

Solitude is better than the society of evil persons.
Abu Bakr

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
Honore de Balzac

Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse

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

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.
Albert Einstein