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Alone Quotes

Byron, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emil Cioran, Edward Young and Wordsworth lead. Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs (1796) supplies the sentence that sums up the page: he was never less alone than when by himself. Shelley, in 1821, loves tranquil solitude and such society as is quiet, wise and good, and Pope’s Ode on Solitude wants a few paternal acres and the air of one’s own ground.

Three entries are flagged. “Solitude is the mother of anxieties,” credited to Publilius Syrus, is disputed. A passage about sitting and thinking in solitude to the music of the stream and the cedar, credited to John Muir, is marked misattributed, and the note points to a Sierra Club page on Muir misquotes. “Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine” is credited to Balzac and marked misattributed.

Random quote on Alone

Most quoted on alone:

Alone!—that worn-out word,
So idly spoken, and so coldly heard;
Yet all that poets sing, and grief hath known,
Of hope laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!

Edward Bulwer-Lytton The New Timon (1846)

O! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought,
Lost to the noble sallies of the soul!
Who think it solitude to be alone.

Edward Young

We enter the world alone, we leave it alone.

James Anthony Froude

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

This sacred shade and solitude, what is it?
'Tis the felt presence of the Deity,
Few are the faults we flatter when alone.

Edward Young

I feel like one,
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!

Thomas Moore

Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die,
Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh?

John Keble The Christian Year (1827)

Life is very long when you're lonely.

Morrissey

When solitude is sought out as a place for the mind to dream in, and not to arouse itself and form plans for future action, it is nothing better than a tomb loaded with lying epitaphs.

Jane Porter

Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more!

William Cowper The Task (1785)

Nobody with me at sea but myself.

Oliver Goldsmith The Haunch of Venison (1776)

Impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

William Wordsworth

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.

William Wordsworth

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.

Charles Bukowski Factotum (1975)

Who knows what true happiness is? Not the conventional word but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Joseph Conrad Under Western Eyes (1911)

He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

James Joyce Dubliners (1914)

Solitude is the place of purification.

Martin Buber I and Thou (1923)

In solitude, when we are least alone.

Lord Byron

Robinson Crusoe hardly used to the best advantage his glorious chance of solitude, because it pleased him to dine with four companions—a parrot, a dog, and two cats. Worse than this, the parrot could talk!

Norman Gale

Whoever gives himself up to solitude,
Ah! he is soon alone.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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