The most solitary I ever felt was when I was living in New York. I used to live in Enrico Caruso's old apartment, and I had a special staircase that took me up to the roof. There was nobody up there.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.

Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty, unfamiliar and perilous.

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

“Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

“In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society.”

The "sociable" man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinions of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment.

"Reading is solitude."

"Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing."

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself."

"Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad."

"There was none of the quiet insolence about this man."

"His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years."

“I can’t but say it is an awkward sight to see one’s native land receding through the growing waters; it unmans one quite, especially when life is rather new.”

“If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.”

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.”

“I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.”

Initially, the horrific images of September 11th triggered an enormous wave of solidarity.

Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.