Quotes About Loneliness

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.

I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.

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.

I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same.

When I left you, you were already more beautiful than anything I dared to dream. In our years apart, my imaginings did their best to improve on your perfection. At night, your face was forever behind my eyes. And now I see that that vision who kept me company in my loneliness was a hag compared to the beauty now before me.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

One leaf left on a branch and not a sound of sadness or despair. One leaf left on a branch and no unhappiness. One leaf left all by itself in the air and it does not speak of loneliness or death. One leaf and it spends itself in swaying mildly in the breeze.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world.

Lisa: 'Do we have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered?' Homer: 'Well, I think the veal died of loneliness.'

Christ's boundless grace confronts our deep necessities. Christ's promised presence confronts our sad and gloomy loneliness. Jesus thus filled with grace so overflowing, with love so tender, with sympathy so exquisite, with power so illimitable, with resources so boundless, with a nature so changeless, stands before us and says to each trembling heart, 'Fear not!'

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.

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.

Living in a rural town really compelled me to start tweeting so much. Mostly, my Twitter usage is fueled by loneliness. I can go days without talking to another human being unless it's my mother, especially when I'm not teaching or on break.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

What, after all, are the world's deepest problems? They are what they always have been, the individual's problems—the meaning of life and death, the mastery of self, the quest for value and worth-whileness and freedom within, the transcending of loneliness, the longing for love and a sense of significance, and for peace. Society's problems are deep, but the individual's problems go deeper; Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, or Shakespeare will show us that, if we hesitate to take it from the Bible.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.

So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.

Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsing at bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime shows and CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger together pressing on my stomach.

Fly-fishing is a magic way to recapture the rapture of solitude without the pangs of loneliness.

The older generation had greater respect for land than science. But we live in an age when science, more than soil, has become the provider of growth and abundance. Living just on the land creates loneliness in an age of globality.

All of that loneliness and longing in my heart got transferred into the book Because of Winn-Dixie, I guess.

...to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.

I 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 unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

Not everyone knows how to be alone with others, how to share solitude. We have to help each other to understand how to be in our solitude, so that we can relate to each other without grabbing on to each other. We can be interdependent but not dependent. Loneliness is rejected despondency. Solitude is shared interdependence.

Sorrow is not in death but in loneliness, and conflict comes when you seek consolation, forgetfullness, explanations, and illusions.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

I've come home in love with loneliness

Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

There'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.

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.

The Lord is near! You're not alone. You may feel alone. You may think you're alone. But there's never a moment in which you face life without help. God is near. God repeatedly pledges his proverbial presence to his people. Don't assume God is watching from a distance. Avoid the quicksand that bears the marker "God has left you!" Don't indulge this lie. If you do, your problem will be amplified by a sense of loneliness. It's one thing to face a challenge, but to face it all alone? Isolation creates a downward cycle of fret.

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth for the other. Now there will be no loneliness, for each of you will be companion to the other. Now you are two persons, but there are three lives before you: His life, Her Life, and Your life together.

...the pain of the constant, bone-chilling loneliness she'd accustomed herself to. And learned to live with it.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

Aloneness is a state of being, whereas loneliness is a state of feeling. It's like the difference between being broke and being poor.

In every seed to breathe a flower, In every drop of dew To reverence a cloister star Within the distant blue; To wait the promise of the how, Despite the cloud between, Is Faith-the fervid evidence Of loneliness unseen.

But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others - a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.

Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.

The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community.

Remember that although the distinction can be difficult to draw, loneliness and solitude are different.

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.

And if I'm alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company.

I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.

It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask. It didn't take your parents getting shot...or cosmic rays or a power ring...Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.