c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home... the earth's biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have.
— Joseph Guth
A house in the middle of nowhere always reminds us our Earth’s position in the universe!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Whenever I look at the masses, I feel one day the earth will certainly explode.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?
— Jane Goodall
If I were in his(Prophet Muhammad) presence, I would wash his feet.
— Hercules
The Earth is what we all have in common.
— Wendell Berry
They've never known a time when people drank rain water because it was pure, or could eat snow, or swim in any river or brook. The last time I drove to Washington the traffic was so bad that I could have made better time with a horse.
— Madeleine L'Engle
Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.
— Matt Haig, The Humans
I don’t know when my time on earth will be up; but I DO know that today, I am one day closer. You can bet I’m going to make this day count! Will you?
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars.
— Leo Tolstoy
Holiness on earth is a spiritual fantasy.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
White men are irresponsible with their power and money. Our beautiful earth is million of years old, and in a mere five hundred years, white people have nearly destroyed it. Another hundred years like the last hundred, and there won't be a living creature left on the planet.-character Amber Johnson (Broken)
— J. Matthew Nespoli
Let the creatures other than man also breathe freely. Remember that earth belongs to all the creatures living in this planet.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
To fly up to the sky and watch the earth is beautiful
—  to fly down to the earth and watch the sky is even more beautiful!
Earth is a natural pearl that will always give us Joy.
— Elena Toledo
Thats what happens to Snow in Texas, lady. It freaking MELTS!!" Leo Valdez- The Lost Hero
— Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero
That is the earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of a hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upwards from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets, and winds, and birds
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Behold, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: 'First kill me before you take possession of my land
— Sitting Bull
The more we nurture the planet, the better and more natural a life we'll have.
— Chris d'Lacey, Icefire
The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense.
— Rivera Sun, Steam Drills, Treadmills and Shooting Stars - a story of our times -
The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we're lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are.
— Ally Condie, Reached
But look around at this world, how perfectly it's made. Flowers can't move, yet the insects come to them and spread their pollen. Trees can't move either, but birds and animals eat their fruit and carry their seeds far and wide.
— Nahoko Uehashi, Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit
The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
And I love everything on this changing, burning earth, but I am most grateful to you.
— Katherine Catmull, Summer and Bird
SIMPLICITY is practicing a lifestyle that is increasingly free of excess, greed, covetousness, and other forms of dependence on the things of this world. The Holy Spirit works through simplicity to release spiritual gifts such as hospitality, mercy, and giving... to live free of anxiety, and to better take care of this Earth.
— Siang-Yang Tan
from the Prize winning poem - UNBORN in the book Terra Affirmative."Under the surface / her body is curled, / seed of the one race, / shell of the world. // She is thw waterfall, / she is the womb, / she is the bubble, /she is the tomb. // Her hair flows upward, / blood red of the birth. / Her arms are folded / deep into the earth. // She is the fern, / she is the bark, / she is the lantern, / she is the dark. // Her eyes burn the flame / of the old and the young. / Her breath is the name / of each branch of each lung. // She is the ingredient. / She is the blend. / She is the beginning. / She is the end.
— Jay Woodman, Riding the Escalator and Terra Affirmative
What a mess the world was in, Vimes reflected. Constable Visit had told him the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve that?
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
This isn't about keeping mountains looking pretty. Ending mountaintop removal is about keeping humanity alive.
— Rivera Sun, Steam Drills, Treadmills and Shooting Stars - a story of our times -
Healthy Earth Equals Healthy Inhabitants
— Laurel Marie Sobol
We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth.
— William A. Anders Apollo 8 Lunar Module Pilot
There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
God is not only something metaphysical, but also the physical world, the plants and animals, the mountains and rivers, the air and the sun and the earth.
— Jeffrey R. Anderson
Makes sense, the earth is quick to consume the flesh of things that ain't natural.
— Neal Shusterman, Red Rider's Hood
Earth travels in the space at the speed of 108,000 kilometres per hour. When you walk calmly in a forest, you must know that you are in fact flying in the space at that crazy speed!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Earth girls aren’t easy.
— Missy Lyons, Alien Promise
Love means to realise that we are one with life. Real love means to realise that we are one with the other person, one with nature, and one with the trees, the stones, the earth and the blue sky. It means to realise that all of life is God.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life
An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.
— Barry López, About This Life
If you desire the path of sincerity, develop a love for obscurity. Flee from the clatter and clinks of fame. Be like the roots of a tree; it keeps the tree upright and gives it life, but it itself is hidden underneath the earth and eyes cannot see it.
— Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak
Measured against eternity, our time on earth is just a blink of an eye...
— Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
Now we, if not in the spirit, have been caught up to see our earth, our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible nor the area we have to live on limitless because unbounded. We are the children of that great blue white jewel. Through our mother we are part of the solar system and part through that of the whole universe. In the blazing poetry of the fact we are children of the stars.
— William Golding
The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real. Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs. Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places. Sometimes ghosts fool you. Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you. But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it.
— Kimberley Griffiths Little
I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I re
— Audrey Hepburn
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
— Aldous Huxley
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occa
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.
— Eve Ensler
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
— Henry David Thoreau
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
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
Solitude sometimes is best society.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
— Albert Einstein
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.
— Aristotle
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
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.
— Wayne W. Dyer
Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.
— Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I prefer to be left alone with my books.
— Alison Weir, Innocent Traitor
Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
— Anthony Burgess, Homage To Qwert Yuiop: Essays
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
Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Betrayed and wronged in everything,I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king,And seek some spot unpeopled and apartWhere I’ll be free to have an honest heart.
— Molière, The Misanthrope
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 Brontë, Wuthering Heights
I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.
— Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
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
Living alone,' November whispered, 'is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn't overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
As soon as we are alone,...inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediatel;y shut ou all our iner doubts, anxieities, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Making All Things New and Other Classics
I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
— Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.
— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
It is in your power to withdraw yourself whenever you desire. Perfect tranquility within consists in the good ordering of the mind, the realm of your own.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. 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, Death in Venice and Other Tales
Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.
— Wayne Cordeiro, Leading on Empty: Refilling Your Tank and Renewing Your Passion
I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
We too are called to withdraw at certain intervals into deeper silence and aloneness with God, together as a community as well as personally; to be alone with Him — not with our books, thoughts, and memories but completely stripped of everything — to dwell lovingly in His presence, silent, empty, expectant, and motionless. We cannot find God in noise or agitation.
— Mother Teresa, In the Heart of the World: Thoughts, Stories and Prayers
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 Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.
— Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story
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
Sure, it sucked to be lost, but I'd long ago realized I preferred it to depending on anyone else to get me where I needed to go. That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened- good, bad, or anywhere in between- it was always, if nothing else, all your own.
— Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
You could concentrate much more deeply when you were alone with agony.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Everybody is a stranger, but that's the danger in going my own way.
— John Mayer, John Mayer: Battle Studies
When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.
— Antonio Porchia, Voices
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, Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto
I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Life is an island in an ocean of solitude and seclusion.Life is an island, rocks are its desires, trees its dreams, and flowers its loneliness, and it is in the middle of an ocean of solitude and seclusion.Your life, my friend, is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains,secluded its happiness and far away in its compassion and hidden in its secrets and mysteries.I saw you, my friend, sitting upon a mound of gold, happy in your wealth and great in your riches and believing that a handful of gold is the secret chain that links the thoughts of the people with your own thoughts and links their feeling with your own.I saw you as a great conqueror leading a conquering army toward the fortress, then destroying and capturing it.On second glance I found beyond the wall of your treasures a heart trembling in its solitude and seclusion like the trembling of a thirsty man within a cage of gold and jewels, but without water.I saw you, my friend, sitting on a throne of glory surrounded by people extolling your charity, enumerating your gifts, gazing upon you as if they were in the presence of a prophet lifting their souls up into the planets and stars. I saw you looking at them, contentment and strength upon your face, as if you were to them as the soul is to the body.On the second look I saw your secluded self standing beside your throne, suffering in its seclusion and quaking in its loneliness. I saw that self stretching its hands as if begging from unseen ghosts. I saw it looking above the shoulders of the people to a far horizon, empty of everything except its solitude and seclusion.I saw you, my friend, passionately in love with a beautiful woman, filling her palms with your kisses as she looked at you with sympathy and affection in her eyes and sweetness of motherhood on her lips; I said, secretly, that love has erased his solitude and removed his seclusion and he is now within the eternal soul which draws toward itself, with love, those who were separated by solitude and seclusion.On the second look I saw behind your soul another lonely soul, like a fog, trying in vain to become a drop of tears in the palm of that woman.Your life, my friend, is a residence far away from any other residence and neighbors.Your inner soul is a home far away from other homes named after you. If this residence is dark, you cannot light it with your neighbor's lamp; if it is empty you cannot fill it with the riches of your neighbor; were it in the middle of a desert, you could not move it to a garden planted by someone else.Your inner soul, my friend, is surrounded with solitude and seclusion. Were it not for this solitude and this seclusion you would not be you and I would not be I. If it were not for that solitude and seclusion, I would, if I heard your voice, think myself to be speaking; yet, if I saw your face, i would imagine that I were looking into a mirror.
— Kahlil Gibran, Mirrors of the Soul
Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. (p. 235)
— Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
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
solitude begins with a time and a place for God, and God alone. If we really believe not only that God exists but also that God is actively present in our lives-- healing, teaching and guiding-- we need to set aside a time and space to give God our undivided attention. (Matt 6:6)
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Making All Things New and Other Classics
I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.
— H. Beam Piper, Fuzzies and Other People
Never forget that solitude is my lot ... I implore those who love me to love my soli
— Rainer Maria Rilke, In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke - A Soul History
We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some-more spectacularly-squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer God. Their solitude is a self-moritification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind.Grenouille's case was nothing of the sort. There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance or wating for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating-and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake lived in the wide world outside.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.
— Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3
I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.
— Alice Munro, Selected Stories
Oh! why was I born with a different face? why was I not born like the rest of my race? when  I look,each one starts! when I speak, I offend; then Im silent & passive & lose every friend. Then  my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, my person degrade & my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; all my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. Im either too low or too highly prized; when elate I m envy'd, when meek Im despis'd
— William Blake
He could have had his choice of any woman in the district. And he chose solitude. Not solitude – that sounds too peaceful. More like solitary confinement.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,When I have no engagements written on my block,When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,When no one comes to take me away from myselfAnd turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,Being so contrived that it takes too long a timeTo get myself back to myself when they have gone.
— Vita Sackville-West
When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.
— Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
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
We enter into solitude first of all to meet our Lord and to be with Him and Him alone. Only in the context of grace can we face our sin
—  only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds
I might be alone, but i'm never lonely.
— Megan Hart
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
He craved silences and solitude. He simply could not get lost in another person’s life.
— Sreesha Divakaran, A Little Chorus of Love
The moon in all her immaculate purity hung in the sky, laughing at this world of dust. She congratulated me for my carefully considered maneuvers and invited me to share in her eternal solitude.
— Shan Sa, Empress
The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.
— Karl Kraus
Your own space, man, it's so important. That's why we were doomed because we didn't have any. It is like monkeys in a zoo. They die. You know, everything needs to be left alone.
— George Harrison, I, Me, Mine
It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something. The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone. The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.''Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?
— Meg Rosoff, The Bride's Farewell
Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.
— Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
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
I've always believed that the only defeats and victories that matter in life are those you lose or win alone, against yourself.
— Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years
I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.
— Saul Bellow
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
We are the puzzle pieces who seldom fit with other puzzle pieces. We inhabit singledom as our natural resting state...Secretly, we are romantics, romantics of the highest order. We want a miracle. Out of millions we have to find the one who will understand. For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date, we dream of going home to watch television. We would prfer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit...but when the quirkyalone collides with another, ooh la la. The earth quakes.
— Sasha Cagen
...the natures of solitary people are apt to have more unmapped country in them than worldly folk imagine. They see and think and do things peculiar to themselves, and one may turn up buried treasure in them at any moment. ("Absolute Evil")
— Julian Hawthorne, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head.
— Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf
I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.
— Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge
Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.
— Haruki Murakami, Kino
I think solitude is a really positive thing. I cherish solitude immensely. In today’s society, there’s so much pressure to communicate, eat out, be friends with people. Why can’t you read a book on your own? Why have you got to have a book club?
— Nicky Wire
There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.
— Charles Baudelaire
Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
— Jean Genet, Querelle of Brest
The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.
— Anaïs Nin
Allow the heart to empty itself of all turmoil! Retrieve the utter tranquility of the mind from which you issued.Although all forms are dynamic,and we all grow and transform,each of us is compelled to return to our root. Our root is quietude.
— Lao Tzu
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all.
— Toni Morrison, A Mercy
I hate all electronic toys: cell phones, e-mail, PalmPilots, handheld Global Positioning System equipment, and the whole raft of gadgets that intrude on solitude.When I was a kid I used to disappear into the woods all day. Now I can walk in the wilderness without wasting my valuable time. As I hike along I can call anyone in the world, schedule an appointment, take a picture of me standing next to a tree and then send the person a map so he or she can join me there. Solitude has been snuffed out.
— David Skibbins, Eight of Swords
Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer
He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.
— Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories
Solitude is a catalyst for innovation
— Mahatma Gandhi
Long have I dwelt forgotten hereIn pining woe and dull despair
— This place of solitude and gloomMust be my dungeon and my tomb.
...since I realized that he (Picasso) lived in a self-enclosed world and that his solitude was therefore total, I wanted to explore my own solitude.
— Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso
You should always aim to be your own mouse, Lieam. In fact...you already are. You are not so quick to jump into danger as Saxon and not as pensive of mind as Kenzie. They rely on each other too much. Saxon knows he can afford to be reckless since Kenzie acts as his conscience. And Kenzie can linger in his thoughts and plans, because he knows Saxon can defend him. I tested Kenzie earlier. I wanted to see if he would be swayed by my advice. It took Saxon's coaxing to make up the greyfur's mind. Be compleete with in yourself young redfur...you will never disappoint. Even in solitude.
— David Petersen, Mouse Guard: Winter 1152
I understand I've made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label 'crazy' bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response. When someone asks if you're crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There's no good answer.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand....How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss....
— Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)
— Sue Monk Kidd, God's Joyful Surprise: Finding Yourself Loved
. . . solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7]
— Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon
... all humans are frightened of their own solitude. Yet only in solitude can man learn to know himself, learn to handle his own eternity of aloneness. And love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other." - The Mountain is Young
— Han Suyin, The Mountain Is Young
Tea should be taken in solitude.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.
— Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
— Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.
— Thomas Browne
Solitude is strength
—  to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.
Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time.
— Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell
The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.
— Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders
All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.
— Blaise Pascal
We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.
— May Sarton
What an ambiance, and such a pity I'm alone: Candles giving off their glow, gusts of wind and the light tapping of rain on the windowpane - a massage for the mind. And a comforting one, too.
— Donna Lynn Hope
For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge, I live alone, I look to die alone: Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge, Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back, My heart goes sighing after swallows flown On sometime summer's unreturning track.
— Christina Rossetti, Complete Poems
Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
In any love-story there are usually two stages or phases. There is the initial stage, where love is expressed by the giving of gifts, especially the gift of self. Then there comes a time when it is no longer enough to give gifts to the beloved, but one has to be ready to suffer for her or for him. Only then can it be seen whether the love is real. In the story of a vocation to consecrated virginity there are also usually two stages. There is the initial stage of the vocation, when, spurred on by grace and attracted by the ideal, one joyfully and enthusiastically says, "Yes, Lord, here I am!" Then comes the time of solitude of heart, of weariness, of crisis, when, in order to maintain that "Yes," one has to die
— Raniero Cantalamessa, Virginity: A Positive Approach to Celibacy for the Sake of the Kingdom of Heaven
Here must thou be, O man,Strength to thyself — no helper hast thou here —Here keepest thou thy individual state:No other can divide with thee this work,No secondary hand can interveneTo fashion this ability. 'Tis thine,The prime and vital principle is thineIn the recesses of thy nature, farFrom any reach of outward fellowship,Else 'tis not thine at all.
— William Wordsworth, The Prelude
I go, I go away, I walk, I wander, and everywhere I go I bear my shell with me, I remain at home in my room, among my books, I do not approach an inch nearer to Marrakech or Timbuktu. Even if I took a train, a boat, or a motor-bus, if I went to Morocco for my holiday, if I suddenly arrived at Marrakech, I should be always in my room, at home. And if I walked in the squares and in the sooks, if I gripped an Arab's shoulder, to feel Marrakech in his person - well, that Arab would be at Marrakech, not I : I should still be seated in my room, placid and meditative as is my chosen life, two thousand miles away from the Moroccan and his burnoose. In my room. Forever.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason