Quotes About Loneliness

Loneliness is the inability to share your story, your Unique Self story. For most people, the move beyond loneliness requires us to share our story with a significant other. For the spiritual elite, the receiving of our own story - and the knowing that it is an integral part of the larger story of All-That-Is - is enough. But for most human beings, loneliness is transcended through contact with another person.

When Christ said: I was hungry and you fed me, he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger.

Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

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 wish other people would write about loneliness more. It's hard to remember that it's not personal. We live in a world that is built to make people lonely... It's difficult to remember that your loneliness is not really about you and everyone has it.

I think that cinema is a great place to make stories of loneliness. And being Norwegian, I don't want to make the film about loneliness in being out in nature on a mountaintop; it's about being in the cities.

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness.

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.

But, 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.

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.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

I thought that it's so sad there are people who live their entire lives lonely. They die and no one goes to their funeral. I thought about how sad that was and how so many people out there have that path. I know this sounds weird, but if I could go take their bones back to my house and appreciate them for what they are, it would be my way of taking that loneliness away.

In short, [photography] is a matter of turning loneliness into thoughts.

Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix.

I 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.

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.

Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

for many people, loneliness was an experience of time. 'Not knowing what to do with yourself' was the way it was usually put.

Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone.

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!'

Every wise workman takes his tools away from the work from time to time that they may be ground and sharpened; so does the only-wise Jehovah take his ministers oftentimes away into darkness and loneliness and trouble, that he may sharpen and prepare them for harder work in his service.

She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.

Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve—like the soul’s version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.

I kept waiting for that loneliness and nervousness to make me want to go back. But it never did.

If you fear loneliness, then don't get married.

Online communities are an expression of loneliness.

The feelings we live through in love and in loneliness are simply, for us, what high tide and low tide are to the sea.

This is how the world changes - little by little, table by table, meal by meal, hour by hour. This is how we chip away at isolation, loneliness, fear. This is how we connect, in big and small ways - we do it around the table.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

The worst part is the unknown. The pain of being alone, the loneliness, is familiar. You've dealt with that. You understand it. But loving someone, risking everything, is unknown. There's no way to know how bad it's going to be. You barely survive the pain of being alone, so how can you deal with anything worse? So you don't bother to try.

At 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.

There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.

People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.

I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living

I had to fight hard against loneliness, abuse, and the knowledge that any mistakes I made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there... I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

loneliness is a twilight moment by feelings, longing after something or someone you can not reach

It made me have a much greater understanding of loss, of loneliness, and the level of intense tragedy that so many people have experienced in this world, I take a lot less for granted.

Loneliness is, I think, people's biggest fear, whether they are conscious of it or not.

The words 'alone,' 'lonely,' and 'loneliness' are three of the most powerful words in the English language. Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

I've also seen that great men are often lonely. This is understandable, because they have built such high standards for themselves that they often feel alone. But that same loneliness is part of their ability to create.

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.