Being Alone quotes
223 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside being alone — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I need someone. I need to hold somebody close. And I need more than this holding. I need someone to understand how I feel at a time like now. And the understanding must be part of the holding."
"People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about."
"That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires - smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge - are basically solitary pursuits."
"Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have."
"Because I cannot work except in solitude, it is necessary that I live my work and that is impossible except in solitude."
"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."
"When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?"
"All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling."
"History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion."
"If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts."
"Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity."
"As I get older I'm more and more comfortable being alone."
"Alone time is when I distance myself from the voices of the world so I can hear my own."
"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
"Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone."
"We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?"
"It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."
"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."
"It would do the world good if every man would compel himself occasionally to be absolutely alone. Most of the world s progress has come out of such loneliness."
"To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls."
