50 Inspirational Quotes About Being Alone That Will Empower Your Solitude

"If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone."

- Maxwell Maltz

"What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be."

- Ellen Burstyn

"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with."

- Wayne Dyer

"What a lovely surprise to discover how un-lonely being alone can be."

- Ellen Burstyn

"Find company within yourself and you’ll never spend a day alone. Find love within yourself and you’ll never have a lonely day."

- Connor Chalfant

"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you are alone with."

- Wayne Dyer

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

- May Sarton

"Loneliness is the poverty of self. Solitude is the richness of self."

- May Sarton

"I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel all alone."

- Robin Williams

"We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly. Spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order."

- Susan L. Taylor

"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

"There is nothing outside of yourself. Look within. Everything you want is there. You are that."

- Rumi

"If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you’ll be living in a world with less fear, isolation, and loneliness."

- Sharon Salzberg

"At the innermost core of loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self."

- Brendan Behan

"In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer."

- Albert Camus

"There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t."

- John Green

"If you smile when you are alone, then you really mean it."

- Andy Rooney

"Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow."

- Janet Fitch

"The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself."

- Michel de Montaigne

"I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person."

- Oscar Wilde

"Be alone, that is the secret of invention; Be alone—that is when ideas are born."

- Nikola Tesla

"If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself."

- Paulo Coelho

"A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings. Remember that next time you feel alone."

- Mandy Hale

"All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."

- Blaise Pascal

"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

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

- Thomas Browne

"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"I was never less alone than when by myself."

- Edward Gibbon

"All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone."

- Jean de la Bruyere

"When everything is lonely I can be my best friend."

- Conor Oberst

"The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself."

- Douglas Coupland

"As I get older I'm more and more comfortable being alone."

- Sienna Miller

"Loneliness is my least favorite thing about life. The thing that I'm most worried about is just being alone without anybody to care for or someone who will care for me."

- Anne Hathaway

"If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company."

- Jean-Paul Sartre

"I restore myself when I'm alone."

- Marilyn Monroe

"In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself."

- Laurence Sterne

"Solitude is independence."

- Hermann Hesse

"You only grow when you are alone."

- Paul Newman

"The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness."

- Norman Cousins

"A human being is a single being. Unique and unrepeatable."

- Eileen Caddy

"I'm very happy alone."

- Octavia E. Butler

"There's a tremendous difference between alone and lonely. You could be lonely in a group of people. I like being alone. I like eating by myself. I go home at night and just watch a movie or hang out with my dog. I have to exert myself and really say, oh God, I've got to see my friends 'cause I'm too content being by myself."

- Drew Barrymore

"Strange the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep people away from me, considering how lonely I feel most of the time. I guess that’s the strange torment I suffer: dying for company, for someone to talk to, but it’s never the right someone who shows. And an unwelcome presence is far worse than the miserable silence."

- Hugh Howey

"If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams; he had his Revell models; he had a gigantic set of Lincoln Logs and built all sorts of stuff with them. His mother had exclaimed more than once that Ben’s Lincoln Logs houses looked better than some real ones that came from blueprints. He had a pretty good Erector Set, too. He was hoping for the Super Set when his birthday came around in October. With that one you could build a clock that really told time and a car with real gears in it. Lonely? he might have asked in return, honestly foozled. Huh? What? A child blind from birth doesn’t even know he’s blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply was, like his double-jointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous."

- Stephen King

"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

"Solitude is the place of purification. In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself."

- Martin Buber

"When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over."

- Audrey Hepburn

"I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me."

- Elizabeth Gilbert

"Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness."

- Janet Fitch

"Someday you’re gonna be all alone, so you need to figure out how to take care of yourself."

- The Queen’s Gambit

"In solitude, the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself."

- Laurence Sterne

"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with."

- Wayne Dyer

"Do not rely on others for your happiness and self-worth. Only you can be responsible for that."

- Stacey Charter

"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will."

- Mahatma Gandhi

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

- May Sarton

"Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings."

- Elizabeth Gilbert

"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

"Being alone is not the same as being lonely. I like to do things that glorify being alone. I buy a candle that smells pretty, turn down the lights and make a playlist of low-key songs. If you don’t act like you’ve been hit by the plague when you’re alone on a Friday night, and just see it as a chance to have fun by yourself, it’s not a bad day."

- Taylor Swift

"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

"I’m actually really interested in living more of a life of solitude. It’s really nice to just have time to be alone, and be expansive and know that you’re enough. I wish I could tell my younger self that."

- Lady Gaga

"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

- Charlotte Brontë

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."

- William P. Douglas

"Knowing how to belong to yourself is an art in a world where everyone is finding their home in others."

- Renuka Gavrani

"There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone."

- Ellen Glasgow

"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony."

- Douglas Coupland

"You need courage to see things differently, courage to go against the crowd, courage to take a different approach, courage to stand alone if you have to, courage to choose activity over inactivity."

- Jim Rohn

"Why does no one tell us how important it is to enjoy being single and being by yourself? That time is defining and amazing and nothing to ‘sure’. It is being alone that will actually set you up the best for being with someone else."

- Drew Barrymore

"The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own."

- Michel de Montaigne

"Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that."

- Jeannette Winterson

"Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice."

- Alice Koller

"I think it’s good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are."

- Amy Sedaris

"Be so fulfilled with yourself, that even when you are alone, you feel in good company."

- Irini Zoica

"Solitude is the soul’s holiday, an opportunity to stop doing for others and to surprise and delight ourselves instead."

- Katrina Kenison

"Live alone in your mind — that is happiness. To have nobody to care for and never minding who cares for one is the way to be free."

- Swami Vivekananda

"Alone time is when I distance myself from the voices of the world so I can hear my own."

- Oprah Winfrey

"I think alone time is good to know how to be alone with your own thoughts. I think it just helps you kind of be a better, more grounded person."

- Carrie Brownstein

"I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters."

- Henry David Thoreau

"Solitude is the place of purification."

- Martin Buber

"There is a magic in walking alone, in thinking alone: If there is no one to contact you around, the universe starts contacting you!"

- Mehmet Murat ildan

"I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone."

- Bobcat Goldthwait

"The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude."

- Gabriel García Márquez

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

- Jeanne Moreau

"Sometimes you need to take a break from everyone and spend time alone to experience, appreciate, and love yourself."

- Robert Tew

"I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public — talent in privacy."

- Marilyn Monroe

"To live alone is the fate of all great souls."

- Arthur Schopenhauer

"Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise, and thousands of nodding acquaintances."

- William Powell

"I’m not alone! I’m with myself. And myself is fabulous."

- Eva Longoria

"The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely."

- Albert Einstein

"Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they’re big flashing signs that something needs to change."

- Gretchen Rubin

"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness."

- Maya Angelou

"Solitude vivifies; isolation kills."

- Joseph Roux

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

- Henrik Ibsen

"Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; Yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth."

- Kahlil Gibran

"Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone."

- Lord Byron

"When the people you love are gone, you're alone."

- Keanu Reeves

"It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me."

- Jodie Foster

"I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone."

- Cyrano de Bergerac

"The best part about being alone is that you really don't have to answer to anybody. You do what you want."

- Justin Timberlake

"He that can live alone resembles the brute beast in nothing, the sage in much, and God in everything."

- Baltasar Gracian

"Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets."

- Paul Tournier

"Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work."

- A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

"You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming."

- Emily Carr

"By all means use some time to be alone."

- Edward Young

"Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better."

- Henry Rollins

"I've also seen that great men are often lonely. This is understandable, because they have built such high standards for themselves that they often feel alone. But that same loneliness is part of their ability to create."

- Yousuf Karsh

"There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire."

- Jules Renard

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

- Tennessee Williams

"I walk a lonely road, the only one that I have ever known."

- Green Day

"There is nothing more lonely or terrifying than feeling unheard."

- House of Cards

"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

"Remember we're all in this alone."

- Lily Tomlin

"I think loneliness probably kills more people than cancer."

- A Simple Favor

"We can all fight against loneliness by engaging in random acts of kindness."

- Gail Honeyman

"Maybe prisoners in isolation feel what I feel: they hate their guards, but a beating now and then is at least some human contact."

- Hugh Howey

"People think I’m odd, so I know how it feels to be different, and I know how lonely that can be."

- Beauty and the Beast

"Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?"

- Jack Gilbert

"She lies there, deflating like a stuck balloon because she knew there would be pain and sometimes, as she's learning so quickly and much too early, we are alone with it. Despite Moms and Dads and all the others who might be hovering nearby, in the end we are alone with it."

- P. Carey Reid

"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear."

- Stephen King

"Solitude is not the absence of Love, but its complement."

- Paulo Coelho

"It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company."

- George Washington

"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."

- Martin Heidegger

"Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for."

- Dag Hammarskjold

"Let your mind alone, and see what happens."

- Virgil Thomson

"A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode."

- Chanakya

"To be adult is to be alone."

- Jean Rostand

"If I am a legend, then why am I so lonely?"

- Judy Garland

"Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out."

- Criss Jami

"It's better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone - so far."

- Marilyn Monroe

"We’re happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time."

- Taylor Swift

"I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference."

- Greta Garbo

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain."

- Paul Cezanne

"Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man."

- Thomas Wolfe

"I have a good life, I remind myself. There are plenty of people who love me. They’re just not around at the moment."

- Cynthia Hand

"I’m not the girl you’re taking home. I keep dancing on my own."

- Robyn

"All great and precious things are lonely."

- John Steinbeck

"They judge me before they even know me. That’s why I’m better off alone."

- Shrek

"The journey’s a lonely one. So much more than we know."

- Kung Fu Panda

"Don’t wanna be all by myself anymore."

- Celine Dion

"There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don't you?"

- Rumi

"I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married."

- Elizabeth I

"A man content to go to heaven alone will never go to heaven."

- Boethius

"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little."

- George Carlin

"In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone; but sometimes it is a great relief."

- John Barrymore

"You’re not alone. I’m awake and I’ve been thinking of you."

- Kygo

"You can leave. I’ll remember you. I remember everyone that leaves."

- Lilo and Stitch

"Just a handful of days like this and Jimmy felt a new Rule of the World: man wasn’t meant to live alone… he spoke with the machines instead. They clacked back at him and hissed deep in their metal throats that man wasn’t supposed to live at all."

- Hugh Howey

"Living alone makes it harder to find someone to blame."

- Mason Cooley

"Ah, look at all the lonely people."

- The Beatles

"It is very easy to love alone."

- Gertrude Stein

"Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone."

- Charlie Chaplin

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much."

- Helen Keller

"For you, nothing is ever enough. Your hunger for love is so great and the hole so unfilled that everything gets swallowed up inside."

- Paullina Simons

"He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I am locked in, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed in a coffin."

- Dan Chaon

"No one would ever find her here. Even from the high saddle there was no sign of the way she'd come, no path, no road, only the bent backs of the hills repeating themselves, over and over, on one side of the road all the way to the western mountains, on the other to the sea."

- Kristy Gunn

"In the beginning, everyone is there, but then they forget."

- Grey’s Anatomy

"Lonely, I’m so lonely, I have nobody to call my own."

- Akon

"6:30, dinner with me. I can’t cancel that again."

- How the Grinch Stole Christmas

"Well, it’s down at the end of Lonely Street at the Heartbreak Hotel."

- Elvis Presley

"Can anybody hear me or am I talking to myself?"

- Simple Plan

"Sometimes you have to stand alone just to make sure you still can."

"Sometimes you need to be alone. Not to be lonely, but to enjoy your free time being yourself."