73 Quotes About Finding Solitude

In our fast-paced, hyper-connected world, finding moments of solitude can often feel like an elusive dream. Yet, these quiet moments alone are essential for personal growth, reflection, and rejuvenation. They offer us a chance to reconnect with our true selves, away from the noise and distractions of everyday life. To inspire your journey towards solitude, we've curated a collection of 73 insightful quotes. Each one serves as a gentle reminder of the power and peace that can be found in those solitary moments. Whether you're seeking comfort, clarity, or creativity, these quotes will encourage you to embrace the beauty of solitude and the profound insights it can provide.

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

3. “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.” - Rudyard Kipling

4. “Then stirs the feeling infinite, so feltIn solitude, where we are least alone.” - George Gordon Byron

5. “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

6. “Who hears music, feels his solitudePeopled at once.” - Robert Browning

7. “but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

8. “Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.” - Sidney Sheldon

9. “Anything we fully do is an alone journey.” - Natalie Goldberg

10. “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” - C.S. Lewis

11. “Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.” - Heather King

12. “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

13. “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

14. “Solitude sometimes is best society.” - John Milton

15. “. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.” - Virginia Woolf

16. “He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul. ” - Isabel Allende

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. “At the foundation of the Christian life, there is a kind of sacred individuality, a sort of holy aloneness that cries out to be left alone with God. This isn't all of the Christian life. It doesn't erase those parts of a Christian's experience that happen in the context of relationships, but this sacred solitude needs to be discovered, respected, and protected.It is that place where we most irrefutably hear God tell us that he loves us, and we come to know that, no matter what other people may say about us or do to us, God will not abandon us. That holy solitude is the place where we find God's Spirit changing our affections and redirecting our identities. It is, for Jesus-followers, holy ground.” - Michael Spencer

19. “There was something lacking – in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)” - Sue Monk Kidd

23. “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

24. “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

25. “For here, inside the crypt, was where he truly lived. Which is to say, for well over twenty hours a day in total darkness and in total silence and in total immobility, he sat on his horse blanket at the end of the stony corridor, his back resting on the rock slide, his shoulders wedged between the rocks and enjoyed himself.” - Patrick Suskind

26. “He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.” - Patrick Suskind

27. “La présence des autres affadit le monde. La solitude est cette conquête qui vous rend jouissance des choses.” - Sylvain Tesson

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. “If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.” - Criss Jami

30. “She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.” - L.M. Montgomery

31. “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

32. “It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” - D.W. Winnicott

33. “Pasmo sempre quando acabo qualquer coisa. Pasmo e desolo-me. O meu instinto de perfeição deveria inibir-me de acabar; deveria inibir-me até de dar começo. Mas distraio-me e faço. O que consigo é um produto, em mim, não de uma aplicação de vontade, mas de uma cedência dela. Começo porque não tenho força para pensar; acabo porque não tenho alma para suspender. Este livro é a minha cobardia.” - Fernando Pessoa

34. “When I was a child, I thought,Casually, that solitudeNever needed to be sought.Something everybody had,Like nakedness, it lay at hand,Not specially right or specially wrong,A plentiful and obvious thingNot at all hard to understand.Then, after twenty, it becameAt once more difficult to getAnd more desired -- though all the sameMore undesirable; for whatYou are alone has, to achieveThe rank of fact, to be expressedIn terms of others, or it's justA compensating make-believe.Much better stay in company!To love you must have someone else,Giving requires a legatee,Good neighbours need whole parishfulsOf folk to do it on -- in short,Our virtues are all social; if,Deprived of solitude, you chafe,It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.Viciously, then, I lock my door.The gas-fire breathes. The wind outsideUshers in evening rain. Once moreUncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what I am."(Best Company)” - Philip Larkin

35. “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

36. “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

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

38. “Alone you're refinding a glittering, a clarity, you're finding your distilled self. ...You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.” - NIkki Gemmell

39. “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

40. “The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.” - Steven L. Peck

41. “Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.” - Paul Brunton

42. “People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.” - Patrick Suskind

43. “He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!” - Patrick Suskind

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

45. “You are at my side, dear friends, and God is everywhere. Yet ultimately we are alone, making our way home by the candle of the heart. The light is steady and sure but extends only far enough to see the next step.Many times the light seems to go out. But another light, one held by a stranger or friend, a book or a song, a blackbird or a wild flower, comes close enough so that we can see our path by its light. And in time we realize that the light we have borrowed was always our own.” - Joan Borysenko

46. “Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.” - C.S. Lewis

47. “... relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.” - Catherynne M. Valente

48. “I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,if there were not a friend?The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

49. “There are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin.” - Roman Payne

50. “I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only - still, I left.” - Mihail Drumeş

51. “It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you?” - Kazuo Ishiguro

52. “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

53. “Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.” - Margaret Atwood

54. “The cold rationalism simply covers for raw, wounded emotion. The more driven people are by the mind, the more they feel and further encode their feelings. The thickness of the tarpaulin cover is as the size of the emotion.” - Dalit Orbach

55. “You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind-- for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive-- even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing.Writing that springs from the surface of existence-- when there is no other way and deeper wells have dried up-- is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes the surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.” - Franz Kafka

56. “When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.” - Octavio Paz

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

58. “One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)” - Ingmar Bergman

59. “When your mind is quiet, when your mind is in silence, then the new arrives.” - Samael Ann Weor

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

61. “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

62. “Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.” - Michael Foley

63. “However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.” - Michael Foley

64. “Uzunca bir süre kendine sığınaklar kurup yıktın: düzen ya da eylemsizlik, başıboş sürüklenme ya da uyku, geceleyin devriye gezmeler, yansız anlar,gölgelerin ve ışıkların kaçışı.Daha uzun bir süre kendine yalan söylemeyi,kendini sersemleştirmeyi,kendi oyununa gelmeyi sürdürebilirsin belki.Ama oyun bitti,büyük şenlik,ertelenmiş yaşamın yalancı sarhoşluğu bitti.Dünya yerinden kıpırdamadı ve sen değişmedin. Kayıtsızlık seni farklı kılmadı.” - Georges Perec

65. “I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.” - Bohumil Hrabal

66. “I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.” - Edward Thomas

67. “The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.” - James Russell Lowell

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

69. “He could have had his choice of any woman in the district. And he chose solitude. Not solitude – that sounds too peaceful. More like solitary confinement.” - Suzanne Collins

70. “What an ambiance, and such a pity I'm alone: Candles giving off their glow, gusts of wind and the light tapping of rain on the windowpane - a massage for the mind. And a comforting one, too.” - Donna Lynn Hope

71. “It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.” - Sherman Alexie

72. “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

73. “His cigarettes helped mark the passage of time, especially on days that seemed all sun and sky...The dependable dwindling of his cigarette supply reassured him that he hadn't been left out here, that eventually he would have to ride into town and things would still be there, that the world hadn't stopped whirling.” - Claire Vaye Watkins