Solitude

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”

Albert Einstein

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

Aldous Huxley

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

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

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
Edward Gibbon

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

"Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement."
Alice Koller

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
Fernando Pessoa

“Being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
Charles Bukowski

“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