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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"My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights."
"Of my friends I am the only one left."
"It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times."
"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."
"One aged man - one man - can't fill a house."
"The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us."
"And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness"
"God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering."
"I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world."
"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."
"Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness."
"Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity."
"I think I'm Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can't imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I'm very Swedish - I don't dislike to be alone."
"I am never less alone than when alone."
"No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness."
"Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories."
"I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody."
"I am not without an object in life, but I feel lonely and deserted."
"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome."
"All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I'm going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them as well."
