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

Although widely attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre, this aphorism is best read as a modern maxim about self-relation rather than a securely documented Sartrean line. It suggests that loneliness in solitude can signal an unresolved relationship with oneself: discomfort with one’s thoughts, self-judgment, or a lack of inner resources. The “bad company” is not literal companionship but the internal companion—one’s own mind—experienced as hostile or empty. In existential terms, it points to the challenge of inhabiting one’s freedom and responsibility without distraction, and to the possibility that learning to be alone is a form of self-knowledge and self-acceptance.