Quotes about solitude and silence
11 passages from classic authors that speak of solitude and silence, for example by Henry David Thoreau, Kobayashi Issa and Confucius.
We kept the passages whose text touches on the theme, starting with those where it comes up most. Each is given word for word, with its author, its work and the reference of the passage. To browse an author’s quotes, follow the name.
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“I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
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“Orphan sparrows, / Are you lonely too? / Come, let me play with you.”
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“Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practises it will have neighbors.”
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“Love is silent; poesy alone can speak for it. Or rather love itself is nothing but the highest poetry of nature.”
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“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
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“Patience; accomplish thy labor; accomplish thy work of affection! Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike.”
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“We must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.”
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“How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
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“I wander’d lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils; / Beside the lake, beneath the trees, / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
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“To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude; it is not retreat but exclusion from mankind.”
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“Oh! she is good, the little rain! and well she knows our need / Who cometh in the time of spring to aid the sun-drawn seed; / She wanders with a friendly wind through silent nights unseen, / The furrows feel her happy tears, and lo! the land is green.”