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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"The most important thing a writer can have [is] the ability to live with the constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing."
"This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century - solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others."
"Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience."
"Greedhas no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome."
"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?"
"Isolation and loneliness create the conditions for rapid aging. The key is to stay connected and open to new relationships throughout your life."
"Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness."
"The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others."
"The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account."
"Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds."
"The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are."
"There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice."
"Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering."
"She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well."
"When I think about popular culture, I can't help but think that we're living in the age of loneliness. There's this illusion that we all have instant access to each other, but we actually have no real connection."
"I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work."
"My loneliness...still comes over me sometimes...It's a liminal, lost sensation of having wandered wide, endless boulevards, among rows of orange trees, winter butterflies, seasons reversed and out of order, dogs barking from behind fences meant to keep out intruders. It's not the place that impoverishes me but I who bring my own sense of poverty, of loss, to the place. It's a sense of near nothingness, as though I were not so much a blank slate as an erased chalkboard, still bearing illegible smudges of smoothed-over writing."
"The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her."
"The best of community does give one a deep sense of belonging and well-being; and in that sense community takes away loneliness."
"We are awakening from the dream of isolation, from the dream of loneliness, and it's a terrible shock."
