This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Egotism erects its center in itself: love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing public, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view of a martyr’s crown - indifferent whether the reward is tin this life or in the next." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society." - William Gilmore Simms
"Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery." - William Gilmore Simms
"Living a good deal alone will, I believe, correct me of my faults; for a man can do without his own approbation in much society, but he must make great exertions to gain it when he lives alone. Without it I am convinced solitude is not to be endured." - Sydney Smith
"The real object of education is to give children resources that will endure as long as life endures; habits that time will ameliorate, not destroy; occupation that will render sickness tolerable, solitude pleasant, age venerable, life more dignified and useful, and death less terrible." - Sydney Smith
"In solitude the mind gains strength, and learns to lean upon herself; in the world it seeks or accepts of a few treacherous supports - the feigned compassion of one, the flattery of a second, the civilities of a third, the friendship of a fourth - they all deceive and bring the mind back to retirement, reflection, and books." - Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
"That inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." - William Wordsworth
"One ought to love society, if he wishes to enjoy solitude. It is a social nature that solitude works upon with the most various power. If one is misanthropic, and betakes himself to loneliness that he may get away from hateful things, solitude is a silent emptiness to him." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
"The love of solitude, when cultivated in the morn of life, elevates the mind to a noble independence, but to acquire the advantages which solitude is capable of affording, the mind must not be impelled to it by melancholy and discontent, but by a real distaste to the idle pleasures of the world, a rational contempt for the deceitful joys of life, and just apprehensions of being corrupted and seduced by its insinuating and destructive gayeties." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
"Those beings only are fit for solitude who are like nobody, and are liked by nobody." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
"Whatever solitude we feel on our journey through life is entirely our own fabrication. We are the only judges who can sentence us to solitary confinement." - Allan J Hamilton
"Religion… shall mean for us, the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." - William James
"To receive and to communicate assistance, constitutes the happiness of human life: man may indeed preserve his existence in solitude, but can enjoy it only in society." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"In the solitude of your mind are the answers to all your questions about life. You must take the time to ask and listen." - Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
"My only task is to be what I am, a man seeking God in silence and solitude, with respect for the demands and realities of his own vocation, and fully aware that others too are seeking the truth in their own way." - Thomas Merton
"One can acquire everything in solitude - except character." - Marie Henri Beyle, better known by pen name Stendhal
"True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others." -
"It takes solitude, under the stars, for us to be reminded of our eternal origin and our far destiny." - Archibald Rutledge
"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone;... if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Great minds are like eagles, and build their nests in some lofty solitude." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"A person who does not know how to use his mind productively will flee from the state of being alone. But when a person has leaned to think, he will greatly appreciate the moments when he is by himself, for then he will be able to utilize those moments for intellectual and spiritual growth. In fact, moments of solitude serve as tests to a person to clarify how thinking-oriented he really is." - Author Unknown NULL
"Love is the doorway thru which the human soul passes from selfishness to service and from solitude to kinship with all mankind." - Author Unknown NULL
"Moral force never dwells in solitude; it will always bring neighbors." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them." - Edmund Burke
"An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror." - Edmund Burke
"Conversation enriches understanding, but solitude is the school of genius." - Edward Gibbon
"But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far its extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love." - Francis Bacon
"It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this scene also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity." - Francis Bacon
"The worst solitude is to have no true friendship." - Francis Bacon
"Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man." - Franz Kafka
"My retirement was now become solitude; the former is, I believe, the best state for the mind of man, the latter almost the worse. In complete solitude, the eye wants objects, the heart wants reciprocation. The character loses its tenderness when it has nothing to strengthen it, its sweetness when it has nothing to soothe it." - Hannah More
"I have three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship and three for society." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Silence and solitude, the soul’s best friends." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Where should the scholar live? In solitude, or in society? In the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark, gray town where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man?" - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength." - Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
"Nothing is achieved without solitude." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
"When we withdraw from human intercourse into solitude, we are more peculiarly committed in the presence of the divinity; yet some men retire into solitude to devise or perpetrate crimes. This is like a man going to meet and brave a lion in his own gloomy desert, in the very precincts of his dread abode." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"The true happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self; and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions; it loves shade and solitude, and naturally haunts groves and fountains, fields and meadows; in short, it feels everything it wants within itself, and receives no addition from multitudes of witnesses and spectators. On the contrary, false happiness loves to be in a crowd, and to draw the eyes of the world upon her. She does not receive satisfaction from the applauses which she gives herself, but from the admiration which she raises in others. She flourishes in courts and palaces, theaters and assemblies, and has no existence but when she is looked upon." - Joseph Addison
"To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented is the only pleasing solitude." - Joseph Addison
"The macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual), and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideas and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. And for the same reason, the visionary realizations of the yogi in solitude would be of the psychological sources out of which the mesocosmic order of his mythologically grounded cultural monad originated." - Joseph Campbell
"Solitude vivifies; isolation kills." - Joseph Roux
"The city does not take away, neither does the country give, solitude; solitude is within us." - Joseph Roux
"Solitude; A good place to visit, but a poor place to stay." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek