This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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
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.
Loneliness | Love | Nature | Power | Society | Solitude | Wisdom | Wishes |
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.
Contempt | Discontent | Life | Life | Love | Melancholy | Mind | Solitude | Wisdom | World |
Marie Henri Beyle, better known by pen name Stendhal
One can acquire everything in solitude - except character.
Love is the doorway thru which the human soul passes from selfishness to service and from solitude to kinship with all mankind.
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.
Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
Loneliness | Solitude | Words |
Conversation enriches understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
Conversation | Genius | Solitude | Understanding |
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.
Humanity | Nature | Solitude | World | Friendship |
Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
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.
John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
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.