96 Quotes About Solitude

In today's fast-paced world, moments of solitude can often feel elusive, yet they hold the potential to offer profound insights and personal growth. Embracing solitude is not simply about being alone; it's about finding a deeper connection with oneself, away from the noise of everyday life. Whether you're seeking inspiration, reflection, or calm, quotes about solitude can be powerful reminders of the strength and clarity that can be found in these quiet moments. This carefully curated collection of 96 quotes captures the essence of solitude, offering wisdom from thinkers, writers, and visionaries who have found solace in their own moments of seclusion. Dive into these quotes and explore the transformative power of embracing solitude, where true peace and creativity can blossom.

1. “If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.” - Aristotle

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

6. “Lonely was much better than alone.” - Toni Morrison

7. “He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.” - Patrick Suskind

8. “We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.” - George Santayana

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

10. “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

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

12. “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.” - Paul Tillich

13. “Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms” - Guy de Maupassant

14. “For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.” - Marcus Aurelius

15. “It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something. The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone. The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.” - Henri J.M. Nouwen

16. “Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

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

18. “What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?” - Kathy Acker

19. “Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.” - Georges Bataille

20. “I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.” - Henry Miller

21. “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

22. “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

23. “An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.” - H.P. Lovecraft

24. “If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth)” - Wendell Berry

25. “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.” - Betty Smith

26. “Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.” - Kahlil Gibran

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

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

29. “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” - Virginia Woolf

30. “No one loves me, - no one cares for me, but you, mother.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

31. “Sure, it sucked to be lost, but I'd long ago realized I preferred it to depending on anyone else to get me where I needed to go. That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened- good, bad, or anywhere in between- it was always, if nothing else, all your own.” - Sarah Dessen

32. “...the natures of solitary people are apt to have more unmapped country in them than worldly folk imagine. They see and think and do things peculiar to themselves, and one may turn up buried treasure in them at any moment. ("Absolute Evil")” - Julian Hawthorne

33. “It did not occur to me that absence of human companionship does not assure solitude. It may, on the contrary, plunge one into an environment compared with which New York or London would appear deserts. For we take memory and imagination with us. The seabirds that scream overhead or waddle along the margins of the surf; the grotesque forms of twisted cedars; the rustle of sea-grass in the wind; the interminable percussion of the breakers; the dead infinity of the sand itself - there can be no solitude, in the sense of freedom from disturbances of thought, in the presence of such things. They draw us back into the maelstrom. ("Absolute Evil")” - Julian Hawthorne

34. “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

35. “Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.” - Samuel Beckett

36. “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

37. “La solitude qui enveloppe les oeuvres d'art est infinie, etil n'estrien qui permette de moins les atteindre que la critique. Seul l'amour peut les appréhender, les saisir et faire preuve de justesse à leur endroit:” - Rainer Maria Rilke

38. “solitude begins with a time and a place for God, and God alone. If we really believe not only that God exists but also that God is actively present in our lives-- healing, teaching and guiding-- we need to set aside a time and space to give God our undivided attention. (Matt 6:6)” - Henri J.M. Nouwen

39. “He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

40. “…she had no resources for solitude…” - Jane Austen

41. “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

42. “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

43. “From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow¬ capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, star¬ing out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot—no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Lands¬man recognizes the expression on Dick's face. It's the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motor¬cycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.” - Michael Chabon

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

45. “Solitude is the house of peace.” - T.F. Hodge

46. “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

47. “To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.” - Alan Bennett

48. “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

49. “We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

50. “...since I realized that he (Picasso) lived in a self-enclosed world and that his solitude was therefore total, I wanted to explore my own solitude.” - Francoise Gilot

51. “His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone, in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.” - Ambrose Bierce

52. “There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.” - صادق هدایت /sadegh hedayat

53. “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

54. “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

55. “God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly” - Paul Valery

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

57. “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

58. “The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

59. “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

60. “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

61. “As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.” - Sigmund Freud

62. “The Old Poets Of ChinaWherever I am, the world comes after me.It offers me its busyness. It does not believethat I do not want it. Now I understandwhy the old poets of China went so far and highinto the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.” - Mary Oliver

63. “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

64. “I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.” - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

65. “If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.” - Criss Jami

66. “I have often wished in vain,' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.''That,' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us.” - Anne Brontë

67. “... 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

68. “The InfiniteIt was always dear to me, this solitary hill,and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,from so much of the ultimate horizon.But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,I create interminable spaces,greater than human silences, and deepestquiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,I go on to compare that infinite silencewith this voice, and I remember the eternaland the dead seasons, and the living present,and its sound, so that in this immensitymy thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweetto me in this sea.” - Giacomo Leopardi

69. “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

70. “A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.” - Don DeLillo

71. “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

72. “If you make friends with yourself, you'll never be alone.” - Maxwell Maltz

73. “Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.” - Herta Müller

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

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

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

77. “Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

78. “We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.” - Vincent Van Gogh

79. “And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.” - Dejan Stojanovic

80. “In solitude, you accumulate energy to spend in crowds; and in crowds, you accumulate energy to spend in solitude!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

81. “We born alone,we all die alone.” - dalin shu

82. “Bien sûr on a des chagrins d’amour, mais on a surtout des chagrins de soi-même. Finalement la vie n’est qu’une affaire de solitude.” - Françoise Sagan

83. “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

84. “CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.GRACE: -Is that an order?CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]” - Tennessee Williams

85. “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

86. “Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” - Philip Larkin

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

88. “Personally, I'd rather grow old alone than in the company of anyone I've met so far. I don't experience myself as lonely, incomplete, or unfulfilled, but I don't talk about that much. It seems to piss people off--especially men. (Kinsey Millhone)” - Sue Grafton

89. “At first the solitudecharmed me like a prelude,but so much music wounded me.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

90. “To find is the thing.” - Pablo Picasso

91. “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

92. “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

93. “He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.” - James Salter

94. “We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.” - William Golding

95. “I had a cup of tea, thought about my day and mostly about the horse whom, though I'd only known him a short time, I called my friend. I have few friends and am glad to have a horse for a friend. After the meal I smoked a cigarette and mused on the luxury it would be to go out, instead of talking to myself and boring myself to death with the same endless stories I'm forever telling myself. I am a very boring person, despite my enormous intelligence and distinguished appearance, and nobody knows this better than I. I've often told myself that if only I were given the opportunity, I'd perhaps become the centre of intellectual society. But by dint of talking to myself so much, I tend to repeat the same things all the time. But what can you expect? I'm a recluse.” - Leonora Carrington

96. “I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem.Watch me burn.Love always, Charlotte” - Charlotte Eriksson