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Welcome to our curated collection of quotes about solitude. We hope you enjoy pondering them, and if you do, please tell others about them.

Remember that although the distinction can be difficult to draw, loneliness and solitude are different.

--Gretchen Rubin

Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.

--Wayne Cordeiro

Solitude, if rightly used, becomes not only a privilege but a necessity. Only a superficial soul fears to fraternize with itself.

--Alice Hegan Rice

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

--Wislawa Szymborska

On being alone: I think it's a good thing to do; you get to know yourself, and I think that's the most important thing in the whole world.

--Robert Paul Smith

Solitude is like punctuation. A paragraph without periods and commas would be exhausting to read.

--Arnie Kozak

Disappear. Then, come back even better.

--Ree Johnson

Half the pleasure of solitude comes from having with us some friend to whom we can say how sweet solitude is.

--William Jay

People who take the time to be alone usually have depth, originality, and quiet reserve.

--John Miller

It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.

--D.W. Winnicott

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

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

--Abraham Cowley

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.

--Abraham Joshua Heschel

He who understands humanity seeks solitude.

--Ali ibn Abi Talib

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.

--Andre Maurois

When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.

--Antonio Porchia

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

--Caroline Knapp

Are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert; or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone?

--Charles Lamb

In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?

--Charles de Gaulle

Friendship needs no words -- it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

--Dag Hammarskjold

Only the bad man is alone.

--Denis Diderot

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

--Edward Hoagland

O sacred solitude! divine retreat!
Choice of the prudent! envy of the great,
By thy pure stream, or in thy waving shade,
We court fair wisdom, that celestial maid.

--Edward Young

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

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

--George MacDonald

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

It is known to many that we need solitude to find ourselves. Perhaps it is not so well known that we need solitude to find our fellows.

--Havelock Ellis

We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart… and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together… I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.

--Helen Hayes

The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

--Henrik Ibsen

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

--James Russell Lowell

To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.

--Jeanne Moreau

Solitude is dangerous. It's very addictive. It becomes a habit after you realise how peaceful and calm it is. It's like you don't want to deal with people anymore because they drain your energy.

--Jim Carrey

The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.

--John Lubbock

What call thou solitude? Is not the earth with various living creatures, and the air replenished, and all these at thy command to come and play before thee?

--John Milton

If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you.

--John O'Donohue

Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.

--Joseph Roux

Solitude is a good place to visit but a poor play to stay.

--Josh Billings

Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.

--Jules Verne

I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.

--Karen Armstrong

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

--Karl Kraus

Introverts like being introverts. We are drawn to ideas, we are passionate observers, and for us, solitude is rich and generative.

--Laurie Helgoe

You don't need to be a monk to find solitude, nor do you need to be a hermit to enjoy it.

--Leo Babauta

Solitude is a lost art in these days of ultra-connectedness.

--Leo Babauta

Solitude, in these days as much as ever, is an absolute necessity.

--Leo Babauta

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

--Liv Tyler

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.

--Lorraine Hansberry

You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.

--Louise Bourgeois

Solitude is the place of purification.

--Martin Buber

Longer Version:

Solitude is the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter.


Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.

--Marty Rubin

Solitude begets whimsies.

--Mary Wortley Montagu

People who abhor solitude may abhor company almost as much.

--Mason Cooley

A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.

--Mason Cooley

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.

--May Sarton

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

--Miguel de Unamuno

People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.

--Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?

--Nathaniel Hawthorne

You only grow when you are alone.

--Paul Newman

Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.

--Paul Tillich

I cannot endure the horror, the evil, which comes to self in solitude.

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.

--Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Solitude is the mother of anxieties.

--Publilius Syrus

He who lives in solitude may make his own laws.

--Publilius Syrus

The solution to alone-ness is not more solitude, but companionship and community.

--Robert Fulghum

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. Solitude is a solitary boat floating in a sea of possible companions.

--Robert Fulghum

There's staggering power in leaving the world and heading out into some solitude for at least an hour every day.

--Robin Sharma

Make the time to be alone. Your best ideas live within solitude.

--Robin Sharma

Fall
in love
with your solitude.

--Rupi Kaur

Retire at various times into the solitude of your own heart, even while outwardly engaged in discussions or transactions with others, and talk to God.

--Saint Francis de Sales

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

--Stendhal

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.

--Susan Cain

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing -- not just a waiting.

--Susan Sontag

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

--Sydney Smith

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

--Tennessee Williams

Spend some time alone. There's so much you don't know about yourself.

--Thibaut

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude.

--Thomas Browne

Longer Version:

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.


Solitude gives birth to the original in us.

--Thomas Mann

Longer Version:

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.


Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

--Thomas Mann

Loneliness is to be avoided, solitude is to be sought.

--Tom Hanks

Solitude isn't loneliness. Solitude is when the entire serene universe seems to surround and hold you quietly.

--Victoria Erickson

If you use that time where you're alone in ways that bring you joy and peace, then that solitude can have a really positive effect on your life.

--Vivek Murthy

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

--Walter Benjamin

A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

--Walter Savage Landor

How different a creature is man in society and man in solitude!

--William Godwin

Give solitude a chance. You've got nothing to lose. And your life to gain back.

--Joshua Becker

Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger.

--Henri J. M. Nouwen

Alone ... The word is life endured and known. It is the stillness where our spirits walk And all but inmost faith is overthrown.

--Siegfried Sassoon

Your inner voice is the voice of divinity. To hear it, we need to be in solitude, even in crowded places.

--A. R. Rahman

Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.

--Anna Neagle

But the delights of solitude don't only consist of dreaming. Next in enjoyment, I think, comes planning.

--Anna Neagle

People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger.

--Andrei Tarkovsky

Alone let him constantly meditate in solitude on that which is salutary for his soul, for he who meditates in solitude attains supreme bliss.

--Guru Nanak

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

--Jane Hirshfield

Only in intimate communion with solitude may man find himself. Solitude is good company and my architecture is not for those who fear or shun it.

--Luis Barragan

Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.

--Kevin Patterson

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?

--Mary Doria Russell

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

--Patricia Highsmith

Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

--Philip Larkin

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

Solitude does not consist in living alone; it consists in living with others, with people who take no interest in you.

--Octave Mirbeau

No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.

--William Gilmore Simms
a woman sits on the end of a dock during daytime staring across a lake

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