The most liberating feeling is enjoying solitude.
Why? Because you can feel free, and learn to enjoy your peace and quiet.
Of course, enjoying the company of other people, such as friends and family is one of the best things ever, but us introverts, we need to recharge our batteries once in a while. And enjoying our solitude is the best way to do so, right?
Let’s go through these quotes about solitude, which I know that you will feel deeply and understand deeply as well.
10 Best Quotes About Solitude
1. “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
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, Walden
3. “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
4. “I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.” ― Audrey Hepburn ( Many -Sided Charmer, LIFE Magazine, December 7, 1953)”
5. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” ― Pablo Picasso
6. “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
7. “In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.” ― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
8. “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
9. “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, Tropic of Cancer
10. “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” ― Aldous Huxley
20 Not Lonely, But Alone Quotes About Solitude
1. “There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned” ― Stephen Vincent Benét, Western Star
2. “Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” ― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
3. “being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
4. “My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.” ― Patricia Highsmith
5. “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, Death in Venice and Other Tales
6. “I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.” ― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World
7. “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, The Waves
8. “Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.” ― Eve Ensler
9. “Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.” ― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
10. “I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” ― Albert Einstein
11. “I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.” ― Charles Bukowski, Factotum
12. “If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
13. “He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.” ― Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
14. “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
15. “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” ― May Sarton
16. “I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference.” ― Greta Garbo, Garbo
17. “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.” ― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
18. “There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.” ― Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Œuvres complètes
19. “In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.” ― Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
20. “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” ― Harold Bloom
See also: 150 Powerful Lighthouse Quotes To Broaden Your Horizons
20 Quote About Peace In Solitude
1. “I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music and I’ll bolt the door.” ― J.D. Salinger, A Boy in France
2. “Betrayed and wronged in everything,
I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king,
And seek some spot unpeopled and apart
Where I’ll be free to have an honest heart.” ― Molière, The Misanthrope
3. “The writer’s curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
4. “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.” ― Rudyard Kipling, The Cat That Walked by Himself: And Other Stories
5. “fall
in love
with your solitude” ― Rupi Kaur, milk and honey
6. “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, Wilfrid Cumbermede
7. “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, Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
8. “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, Too Loud a Solitude
9. “You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.” ― Charlotte Eriksson
10. “The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11. “Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone.” ― George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
12. “I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
13. “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, White Mountain
14. “What’s a rainy day
without some delicious
coffee-flavoured loneliness?” ― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence
15. “It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” ― D.W. Winnicott
16. “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
17. “This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
18. “Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.” ― Sidney Sheldon, Master of the Game
19. “. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.” ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
20. “Lonely was much better than alone.” ― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
See also: 140 Regret Quotes That Will Help You Grow As A Person
20 Famous And Popular Quotes About Solitude
1. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
2. “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” ― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
3. “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more” ― Lord Byron
4. “We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.” ― Hermann Hesse
5. “Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” ― Honoré de Balzac
6. “Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.” ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
7. “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, Never Let Me Go
8. “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
9. “Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Broken Wings
10. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” ― Henry David Thoreau
11. “If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” ― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
12. “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.” ― Franz Kafka
13. “Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.” ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
14. “People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
15. “To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.” ― Anthony Burgess, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Essays
16. “I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only – still, I left.” ― Mihail Drumeş
17. “I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below.” ― Jean Giono, An Italian Journey
18. “Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.” ― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
19. “She was waiting, but she didn’t know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.” ― Albert Camus
20. “How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?” ― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God
20 Quotes About Solitude And Silence
1. “Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, deathlike solitude.” ― Mary W. Shelley
2. “But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” ― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
3. “Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life – that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.” ― Victoria Erickson
4. “When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.” ― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
5. “A lonely day is God’s way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
6. “It is in your power to withdraw yourself whenever you desire. Perfect tranquility within consists in the good ordering of the mind, the realm of your own.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
7. “We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young — not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age — and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.” ― J. Krishnamurti
8. “For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.” ― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
9. “You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.” ― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
10. “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, Letters to a Young Poet
11. “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, The Scarlet Letter
12. “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, Journey to the End of the Night
13. “it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
14. “If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.” ― Thomas Ligotti , The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
15. “People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.” ― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
16. “Living alone,’ November whispered, ‘is a skill, like running long distances or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn’t overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being.” ― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
17. “What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one’s self?” ― Henrik Ibsen
18. “We too are called to withdraw at certain intervals into deeper silence and aloneness with God, together as a community as well as personally; to be alone with Him — not with our books, thoughts, and memories but completely stripped of everything — to dwell lovingly in His presence, silent, empty, expectant, and motionless. We cannot find God in noise or agitation.” ― Mother Teresa, In the Heart of the World: Thoughts, Stories and Prayers
19. “But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted – beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” ― Virginia Woolf, The Waves
20. “The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.” ― Karl Kraus
See also: 110 Attitude Happy Alone Quotes That Will Uplift You
30 Enjoying Solitude Quotes
1. “Solitude sometimes is best society.” ― John Milton, Paradise Lost
2. “For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. 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… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.” ― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
3. “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, Steppenwolf
4. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
5. “Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.” ― Aristotle
6. “Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
7. “Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.” ― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
8. “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, Killosophy
9. “But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
10. “You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.” ― Wayne W. Dyer
11. “I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.” ― Søren Kierkegaard
12. “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, The Journals of Sylvia Plath
13. “Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.” ― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
14. “What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
15. “I prefer to be left alone with my books.” ― Alison Weir, Innocent Traitor
16. “I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.” ― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
17. “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
18. “Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.” ― Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
19. “The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.” ― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
20. “I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.” ― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
21. “I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.” ― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
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, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
23. “The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.” ― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
24. “I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more.” ― Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Vol 11, January 1787 to August 1787
25. “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, The Unnamable
26. “Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.
Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace” ― Dean Koontz, The Good Guy
27. “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, Empress
28. “I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
29. “We need solitude, because when we’re alone, we’re free from obligations, we don’t need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.” ― Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story
30. “Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.” ― Wayne Cordeiro, Leading on Empty: Refilling Your Tank and Renewing Your Passion
20 Wise Quotes About Solitude
1. “Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.” ― Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself
2. “Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
3. “I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action;
and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
and I want my grasp of things to be
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the wildest storm of all.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
4. “I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.” ― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
5. “If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
6. “I hate solitude, but I’m afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It’s already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.” ― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
7. “Believe me, I know what it’s like to feel all alone…the worst kind of loneliness in the world is the isolation that comes from being misunderstood, It can make people lose their grasp on reality.” ― Dan Brown, Inferno
8. “As soon as we are alone,…inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediatel;y shut ou all our iner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Making All Things New and Other Classics
9. “In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.” ― Aldous Huxley
10. “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
11. “I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.” ― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
12. “There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.” ― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
13. “Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It’s terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can’t see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn’t as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn’t: it’s just a waste.” ― Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica
14. “We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some-more spectacularly-squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer God. Their solitude is a self-moritification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind.
Grenouille’s case was nothing of the sort. There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance or wating for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating-and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake lived in the wide world outside.” ― Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
15. “My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.” ― A.S. Byatt, Possession
16. “Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.” ― Jean Rhys, Quartet
17. “God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly” ― Paul Valéry
18. “Introverts live in two worlds: We visit the world of people, but solitude and the inner world will always be our home.” ― Jenn Granneman, The Secret Lives of Introverts: Inside Our Hidden World
19. “Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only – to be left alone.” ― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
20. “But I need solitude–which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo
Final Word
I hope that you have enjoyed reading my collection of the best quotes about solitude that I managed to find online.
Learn to embrace your solitude, because, as they say, your true power is within you when you are by yourself!
Read next: 100 Being Alone Quotes To Embrace The Beauty Of Solitude
