57 Solitude Quotes For Reflection

In a world that's constantly bustling with noise and activity, finding moments of solitude can be incredibly refreshing and essential for personal growth. Whether you’re an introvert who thrives in quiet settings or someone who simply values the occasional break from the chaos, solitude offers a unique opportunity for introspection and clarity. In this blog post, we've curated a collection of the top 57 solitude quotes to inspire reflection and a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you. These quotes capture the beauty of solitary moments and the profound insights that they can bring. Dive in and let these words of wisdom guide you on your journey of self-discovery.

1. “In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.” - Sarah Orne Jewett

2. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” - Henry David Thoreau

3. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” - Charlotte Brontë

4. “Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.” - Rollo May

5. “I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said 'I want to be let alone!' There is all the difference.” - Greta Garbo

6. “What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.” - Charles Baxter

7. “I want my own will, and I wantsimply to be with my will,as it goes toward action.And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who knowsecret things or else alone...I want to unfold.I don’t want to be folded anywhere,because where I am folded,there I am a lie.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

8. “I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next. ” - Henry David Thoreau

9. “In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.” - Henri J.M. Nouwen

10. “I might be alone, but i'm never lonely.” - Megan Hart

11. “Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.” - Virginia Woolf

12. “there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along....” - Rainer Maria Rilke

13. “And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

14. “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

15. “When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.” - Antonio Porchia

16. “She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.''Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?” - Meg Rosoff

17. “Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.” - Elizabeth von Arnim

18. “He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.” - Stefan Zweig

19. “Here must thou be, O man,Strength to thyself — no helper hast thou here —Here keepest thou thy individual state:No other can divide with thee this work,No secondary hand can interveneTo fashion this ability. 'Tis thine,The prime and vital principle is thineIn the recesses of thy nature, farFrom any reach of outward fellowship,Else 'tis not thine at all.” - William Wordsworth

20. “Michael wasn't on the pool deck, which was hard for me. None of my old Coral Springs teammates were around. Still, that old plane of cement felt like home. I folded my clothes and put them on the bench. I placed my water bottle under my starting block, and I dove in. Once again, I felt that ultimate state of transition, my feet no longer on the ground, my hands not yet in the water.” - Dara Torres

21. “Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough.” - John Keats

22. “Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.” - Susanna Clarke

23. “Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone” - Jack Kerouac

24. “The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.” - Charles Baudelaire

25. “I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.” - Franz Kafka

26. “Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.” - Mike Norton

27. “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

28. “I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.” - W.B. Yeats

29. “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

30. “There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps...” - Jean-Pierre Melville

31. “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

32. “In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

33. “Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.I forget who said it and I no longer care.” - Ben Marcus

34. “Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

35. “I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.” - Marilynne Robinson

36. “Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.” - Wayne Cordeiro

37. “I think solitude is a really positive thing. I cherish solitude immensely. In today’s society, there’s so much pressure to communicate, eat out, be friends with people. Why can’t you read a book on your own? Why have you got to have a book club?” - Nicky Wire

38. “A pine tree standeth lonelyIn the North on an upland bare;It standeth whitely shroudedWith snow, and sleepeth there.It dreameth of a Palm treeWhich far in the East alone,In the mournful silence standethOn its ridge of burning stone.” - Heinrich Heine

39. “I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end.” - Steven L. Peck

40. “The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.” - Eugene O'Neill

41. “La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose.” - Honoré de Balzac

42. “SolitudeThere is a charm in Solitude that cheersA feeling that the world knows nothing ofA green delight the wounded mind endearsAfter the hustling world is broken offWhose whole delight was crime at good to scoffGreen solitude his prison pleasure yieldsThe bitch fox heeds him not -- birds seem to laughHe lives the Crusoe of his lonely fieldsWhich dark green oaks his noontide leisure shields” - John Clare

43. “Companionship is a foreign concept to some people. They fear it as much as the majority of people fear loneliness.” - Criss Jami

44. “Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

45. “He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool-though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.” - Patrick Suskind

46. “All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” - Virginia Woolf

47. “For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.” - Elizabeth von Arnim

48. “Let us not be bored” - Joe Buberger

49. “My fear of loneliness is like a disease.” - Irene Tomkinson

50. “Life has ill-prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers.” - Laurie R. King

51. “When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.” - Criss Jami

52. “...I got to love solitude - to see the Moon rise and set - I had time to watch it trace the window square across the wall in silent grace...” - John Geddes

53. “I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people.” - Sara Quin

54. “He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.” - Peter Heller

55. “I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?” - Sylvia Plath

56. “If you are lonely, you feel separated from everybody. If you are in solitude, you feel you are in contact with the entire universe.” - Siren Waroe

57. “She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez