Popular quotes about Loneliness! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Solitude is a condition of peace that stands in direct opposition to loneliness. Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. loneliness is small, solitude is large. loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nodbody answers; solitude has it's roots in the great silence of eternity.
Kent NerburnSOLIDAO, LONELINESS. 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? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth?
Pascal MercierI am going to give you a piece of advice... advice I wish I'd been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don't-do-acid and don't-drink-and-drive films. I wish our counselors had told us, 'When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is the list of the symptoms, and don't worryโloneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one factโloneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.
Douglas CouplandThere is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity. All young people should be taught now to put up with loneliness ... because the less man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.
Arthur SchopenhauerOne of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness. I mean it's one of the things that goes way back; loneliness is not good for the world. And so, whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural, and healthy to want somebody to go through life with. It's central to our humanity.
Rob BellTo live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.
Henri NouwenThere is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
Eric HofferPlease make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.
Leonard CohenAll 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.
Morrie SchwartzIn our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if theyโre foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.
John IrvingThere, 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.
Toni MorrisonBut, visiting Sea, your love doth press / And reach in further than you know, / And fills all these; and, when you go, / There's loneliness in loneliness.
Alice MeynellPeople claim that love is the deepest feeling, but don't you believe it. Loneliness is the most affecting of human emotions. Nothing makes life more vivid. If you wish to live in the moment, I recommend intense loneliness.
SethLoneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced.
David MitchellI am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream
Jack KerouacI could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonI have a lot of friends, but my biggest fear is loneliness. I miss my family in Mumbai, and my biggest nightmare every day is to go back home alone.
Deepika PadukoneAlthough the warrior's life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others...Yet he is more and more in love with the world. That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others. By renouncing his private world, the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart. This is not something to feel bad about; it is a cause for rejoicing.
Chogyam TrungpaMy peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.
Franz KafkaI look at pictures of you because I am afraid that you would notice me staring in real life. I looked at your picture today for countless minutes. It is closer than Iโll ever get to you for real. I felt like I was looking at a captured animal at a safe distance. If you knew I was doing this, you would feel sickened and frightened. Thatโs why youโll never know. Years will go by and youโll never know. I will never say the things that I want to say to you. I know the damage it would do. I love you more than I hate my loneliness and pain.
Henry Rollinslove all the people you can. The sufferings from love are not to be compared to the sorrows of loneliness.
Susan HaleThere is no final solution to loneliness until you recognize that you need the resources which are in yourself to enpy, within limits, being alone being the kind of person that you like to be with, and reaching out to others, not in a grasping way, but in an attempt to be meaningful and loving and of service in their lives.
Truman G. MadsenAt this time of crisis we cannot be concerned solely with ourselves, withdrawing into loneliness, discouragement and a sense of powerlessness in the face of problems. Please do not withdraw into yourselves! This is a danger: we shut ourselves up in the parish, with our friends, within the movement, with the like-minded... but do you know what happens? When the Church becomes closed, she becomes an ailing Church, she falls ill! That is a danger. . . .A Church closed in on herself is the same, a sick Church.
Pope FrancisThe loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.
Richard PowersPeople don't acknowledge loneliness in themselves, and don't appreciate its benefits, the reflection and attentiveness that come with it, the deepened acquaintance with oneself.
Marilynne RobinsonIn a world characterized by loneliness and despair, we can reach out in love to those around us. Or, as St. Francis once said, we can "preach the gospel all the time; if necessary, use words."
Phil CallawayMany times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small.
Gordon ParksMemories and loneliness look backward, fear looks around, but faith always looks forward.
E. Lynn HarrisFor loneliness, worries, difficulties, the unsatisfied need for kindness and sympathy - that is what is hard to bear.
Vincent Van GoghHow on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.
Kurt VonnegutLoneliness is, I think, people's biggest fear, whether they are conscious of it or not.
Andrew StantonIt is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.
Joseph Conradthere is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock
Charles BukowskiI am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfishโฆ You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de BeauvoirThe leaves are falling, falling as from way off, as though far gardens withered in the skies; they are falling with denying gestures. And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We all are falling. This hand falls. And look at others: it is in them all. And yet there is one who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
F. Scott FitzgeraldHe seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.
Edith WhartonWhen so much is left to the listener's imagination, it is bound to be more scary. But our stories are not just to frighten; they are engaged with the things that are really scary like loneliness and madness.
Larry FessendenGail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.
Frederick BuechnerThere's a weird loneliness that comes with being a comedian, especially standup. Even with improvisers, I think there are certain moments of truth where you feel really, really connected to audiences, and that's when you're on stage. I think there's definitely something inside the personality of a person who wants to be a comedian that's looking to connect at all times. That's where the adrenaline rushes in their lives come from.
Chris Gethard