In a world that's constantly buzzing with the noise of social interactions and digital chatter, finding solace in solitude can be a rare and transformative experience. Embracing solitude is not about isolating oneself from the world but rather about embracing the peace and clarity that come from spending time alone. This practice allows us to reconnect with our inner selves, fostering self-discovery and personal growth. In this collection of 46 insightful quotes, you'll find inspiration from thinkers, writers, and visionaries who have appreciated the profound beauty of solitude. Whether you're seeking comfort in quiet moments or looking to deepen your self-awareness, these quotes offer timeless wisdom on the art of being alone.
1. “Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.” - George Mac Donald
2. “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” - Henry David Thoreau
3. “You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.” - Wayne W. Dyer
4. “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” - May Sarton
5. “What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?” - Henrik Ibsen
6. “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” - Aldous Huxley
7. “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.” - Rudyard Kipling
8. “The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,The winds that will be howling at all hours,And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather beA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.” - William Wordsworth
9. “From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.” - Betty Smith
10. “We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.” - Storm Jameson
11. “The moon in all her immaculate purity hung in the sky, laughing at this world of dust. She congratulated me for my carefully considered maneuvers and invited me to share in her eternal solitude.” - Shan Sa
12. “I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.” - P.D. James
13. “La solitude à deux est l'enfer consenti.” - Michel Houellebecq
14. “I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.” - Alice Munro
15. “But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.” - Thomas Merton
16. “There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.” - Tobias Wolff
17. “The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.” - Peter Hessler
18. “She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.''Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?” - Meg Rosoff
19. “When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.” - Jules Verne
20. “Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all.” - Toni Morrison
21. “Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.” - Hermann Hesse
22. “For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: Life--real life--was just a solitude waiting to be transfigured. If Phillip was with her, the solitude she needed would be shattered, and along with it whatever wondrous thing might have come her way if she had been alone.” - Kevin Brockmeier
23. “I hate all electronic toys: cell phones, e-mail, PalmPilots, handheld Global Positioning System equipment, and the whole raft of gadgets that intrude on solitude.When I was a kid I used to disappear into the woods all day. Now I can walk in the wilderness without wasting my valuable time. As I hike along I can call anyone in the world, schedule an appointment, take a picture of me standing next to a tree and then send the person a map so he or she can join me there. Solitude has been snuffed out.” - David Skibbins
24. “In the wide pile, by others heeded not,Hers was one sacred solitary spot,Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves containFor moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.” - Walter Scott
25. “Divide the constant tide and random noisiness of energetic flow, with conscious recurring moments of empty mind, solitude, gratitude and deep...slow...breathing. Of this, the natural law of self-preservation demands.” - T.F. Hodge
26. “Allow the heart to empty itself of all turmoil! Retrieve the utter tranquility of the mind from which you issued.Although all forms are dynamic,and we all grow and transform,each of us is compelled to return to our root. Our root is quietude.” - Lao Tzu
27. “One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments...is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is 'dis-ease.” - T.F. Hodge
28. “Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way--and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
29. “They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.” - Ellis Peters
30. “It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” - D.W. Winnicott
31. “God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly” - Paul Valery
32. “Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smelling of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper.He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because someewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.” - James Jones
33. “So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.” - Sylvia Plath
34. “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
35. “Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.” - Edith Wharton
36. “La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose.” - Honoré de Balzac
37. “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” - Thomas Mann
38. “Companionship is a foreign concept to some people. They fear it as much as the majority of people fear loneliness.” - Criss Jami
39. “It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.” - Søren Kierkegaard
40. “I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable.” - Allen Shawn
41. “Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.” - Jean Rhys
42. “I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
43. “We born alone,we all die alone.” - dalin shu
44. “The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.” - James Russell Lowell
45. “I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?” - Sylvia Plath
46. “To find is the thing.” - Pablo Picasso
