Lonely quotes
1.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside lonely — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"You can't work at a relationship; you can't control it. You have to be lucky and go through your life. If you are not lucky you have to be prepared for some degree of suffering. That's why most relationships are very difficult and have some degree of pain. People stay together because of inertia, they don't have the energy. Because they are frightened of being lonely, or they have children."
"My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes. They are the cradle of the morning, they are the kingdom of the stars. My songs are lost in their depths. Let me but soar in that sky, in its lonely immensity. Let me but cleave its clouds and spread wings in its sunshine."
"It was lonely on the hill, and cold. And all you could do was keep going. You could scream, cry, and stamp your feet, but apart from making you feel warmer, it wouldn’t do any good. You could say it was unfair, and that was true, but the universe didn’t care because it didn’t know what “fair” meant. That was the big problem about being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you."
"Virtuous men alone possess friends."
"The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are."
"I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God."
"Trying to be a professional dancer, paying my rent by posing nude for art classes, staring at people staring at me naked. Daring them to think of me as anything but a form they were trying to capture with their pencils and charcoal. I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going."
"I was lonely driving here tonight so I hugged the road."
"A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."
"I never feel lonely in the kitchen. Food is very friendly."
"I'm not alone, but I am lonely without you."
"...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things."
"We're all outsiders in a way. We're all alone and can become very lonely"
"Oft in the silence of the night, When the lonely moon rides high, When wintry winds are whistling, And we hear the owl's shrill cry, In the quiet, dusky chamber, By the flickering firelight, Rising up between two sleepers, Comes a spirit all in white."
"arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way."
"What is it that we call loneliness. It can’t simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it?"
"The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure I'm lonely I'm a failure I'm lonely) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras."
"It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours."
"An ad that pretends to be art is - at absolute best - like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair."
"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."
