Loneliness quotes
1.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside loneliness — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness."
"She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still."
"The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history."
"It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?-No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink-Here you are again, it says, and so am I."
"I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all."
"I'm just a believer in keeping all of the creative brain cells moving and working even when you're not working because the inevitable loneliness and boring drought in the actor's world, it can eat you alive."
"Fundamentally, diaries are about loneliness."
"Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness."
"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."
"We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves."
"So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labeling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don’t act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is. Stay alert, stay present - present with your whole Being, with every cell of your body. As you do so, you are bringing a light into this darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness."
"Our selfishness will condemn us to the worst suffering that we ourselves have invented - loneliness."
"You were my hope during my days of loneliness, my anxiety during moments of doubt, my certainty during moments of faith."
"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."
"He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things."
"Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company."
"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."
"When people are lonely they stoop to any companionship."
"Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character."
