"Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness."
- Glenn Gould
Photo: Yousuf Karsh, 1957
@holdengraber

"Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine."
- Honoré de Balzac

Auguste Rodin, Study for the Head of the Monument to Honoré de Balzac, 1893-1897
The Cleveland Museum of Art
@ClevelandArt

"If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die."
- Nelson Mandela
Photo: Mark Seliger

"Remember, there are only three tempi in jazz – slow, medium and slow."
- Ben Webster
Solitude, from Big Ben Time, 1967 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=VihgeOi0Rn8&feature=emb_logo

André Kertész
Fork, Paris, 1928
"He had a life in which he isolated himself from things that benefitted him, but it was a solitude from which he drew great strength."
- David Travis

"The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur are as much figures of epiphany as the opium eater, the dreamer, the drinker. And more profane. Not to mention that most fearful drug - ourselves - which we imbibe in solitude."
- Walter Benjamin

Photo: Ferdinando Scianna, 1983

"The few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude."
- Colette
Paris, 1935
#Caturday

Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once.
- Robert Browning
With his son Robert Barrett in Venice, 1889

"Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Caricature by Wilhelm Busch

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
- Edward Gibbon

Another Glenn Gould quote:
"Solitude fuels creativity, whereas brotherly camaraderie tends to dissipate it. Isolation is the one sure way to happiness."
Photo: Erich Lessing, 1957

"Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude."
- Marcel Proust
Design: David Pearson

"The idleness of society is deadly because it is obligatory; the idleness of solitude is delightful because it is free & voluntary."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions
French playing card by Pinau, 1792
Sage (roi) de trèfles / King of Clubs

"The prophet seeks out solitude. . . . He goes into the desert to think. Of what? Of the multitudes."
- Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare
Caricature by B. Moloch, 1882

"The world wishes to tear everyone from, and restore everyone to, himself."
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Book of Friends
Gustave Moreau
Solitude
Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris

André Kertész
Solitude
New York, 1966

Noël Le Boyer
Un marin dans la solitude des Tuileries, 1940

Léon Claude Vénézia
Homme sur une ancienne passerelle sur le canal de l'Ourcq au niveau du passage de Flandre
Paris, XIXème arr., c. 1968

Leiss Ferruccio
The interior of a bar in Venice, 1945

Léon Claude Vénézia
Bobigny (Seine-saint-Denis), 1970

Jean Marquis
Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève et l'église Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. Prise à l'angle de la rue Laplace, 1963-64

I wonder if Jean Marquis knew Don Hunstein's famous shot of Bob Dylan & Suze Rotolo, used on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (released in May 1963).
Or Roy Schatt's portrait of James Dean walking down 68th Street in New York, from back in 1954.

Fernandel by Boris Lipnitzki