Monday, January 5th 2009 by Shanel Yang
Glad we all survived the holidays in one piece! Fun as they are, all the festivities can actually bring some folks down. In fact, many people, for one reason or another, find the Winter holidays to be the loneliest time of the year. If you happen to be like this, take heart because the new year is already chugging along and we are headed toward all kinds of amazing experiences and enlightening revelations in the months ahead!
In this post, we are taking a look at what different people, from the past and present, had to say about loneliness. In gathering these quotes, I was happily surprised to find that there is a beneficial side to loneliness: Imagination, creativity, and productivity are all heightened when we are left alone—as long as we don’t view our solitude as a negative. However, if we do view being alone as a negative, then it can easily become the biggest obstacle to everything we try to accomplish in life because, as the quotes below suggest, the ghost of loneliness can haunt us forever if we let it.
300 QUOTES ABOUT LONELINESS
1. Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.
- Mortimer Adler
2. Separate we come, and separate we go,
And, this be it known, is all that we know.
- Conrad Aiken
3, Memories are the treasures that we keep locked deep within the storehouse of our souls, to keep our hearts warm when we are lonely.
- Becky Aligada
4. Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and, it’s all over much too soon.
- Woody Allen
5. I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.
- Pedro Almodovar
6. I have so many different personalities in me, and I still feel lonely.
- Tori Amos
7. Am I lonely? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. Am I confused? Yes, … Do I have my days when I’ve thrown a little pity party for myself? Absolutely. But, I’m also doing really well.
- Jennifer Aniston
8. Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
- Maya Angelou
9. We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
- Maya Angelou
10. As far as I knew, white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them, and Black women worked for them.
- Maya Angelou
11. When we truly realize that we are all alone is when we need others the most.
- Ronald Anthony
12. No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
- Aristotle
13. Touring is really a pretty lonely business.
- Eddy Arnold
14. Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.
- Nancy Astor
15. Being human is the most terrible loneliness in the universe.
- A. A. Attanasio
16. Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
- Francis Bacon
17. 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.
- Russell Baker
18. It’s a dismally lonely business, writing.
- Toni Cade Bambara
19. 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.
- Bruce Barton
20. Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.
- Vicki Baum
21. All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
- The Beatles
22. Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.
- Martha Beck
23. Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.
- Martha Beck
24. At times in my life, I have been utterly lonely. At other times, I’ve had disgusting infectious diseases. Try admitting these things in our culture.
- Martha Beck
25. When friendship disappears, then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world, which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.
- Hilaire Belloc
26. New York is tough on lonely people.
- Michael Bergin
27. Writing is an antidote for loneliness.
- Steven Berkoff
28. No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.
- Georges Bernanos
29. My earliest memory is loneliness. That’s a hard thing to live with.
- Juliette Binoche
30. Loneliness is an unhappy compound of having lost one’s point of reference, of suffering the fate of individual and collective discontinuity, and of living through or dying from a crisis of identity to the point of alienation of one’s self.
- Ludwig Binswanger
31. Dreams have but one owner at a time. That is why dreamers are lonely.
- Erma Bombeck
32. I like to be against the odds. I’m not afraid to be lonely at the top. With me, it’s just the satisfaction of the game. Just performance.
- Barry Bonds
33. Only in a house, where one has learnt to be lonely, does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
- Elizabeth Bowen
34. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
- Elizabeth Bowen
35. It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain, of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
- Benjamin Britten
36. But, when you actually go in the ring, it’s a very lonely and scary place. It’s just you and the other guy.
- Frank Bruno
37. All men’s misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone.
- Jean de la Bruyere
38. The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
- Pearl S. Buck
39. Inside myself is a place where I live all alone; and, that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.
- Pearl S. Buck
40. I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn’t have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol, or just that you were able to achieve your dreams.
- Augusten Burroughs
41. What a lovely surprise to discover how un-lonely being alone can be.
- Ellen Burstyn
42. I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, “No, I won’t do it. I won’t behave this way anymore. I’m lonely; and, I need people around me. Maybe, I have to change my methods of behaving.” And, then you do it.
- Leo Buscaglia
43. I think probably the only thing that is around in these songs is that I was really lonely when I wrote a lot of them. But it was really by my own choosing because I was devoting myself to songwriting and dancing, and I wasn’t really going out and seeing people.
- Kate Bush
44. Loneliness has been described as a chronic disease with no redeeming features. But, it is very important for the survival of our species. It contributes to our humanity.
- John Cacioppo
45. The factors that we find predicting loneliness are the factors that lead to a disruption of your social relationships.
- John Cacioppo
46. Our results indicate loneliness is not a personality weakness. Quite the contrary, it is just part of the genetic variation that we find in humans.
- John Cacioppo
47. Lonely people differ from non-lonely individuals in their tendency to perceive stressful circumstances as threatening rather than challenging, and to passively cope with stress by failing to solicit instrumental and emotional support, and by withdrawing from stress rather than by actively coping and attempting to problem solve.
- John Cacioppo
48. Anger is a manifestation of a deeper issue … and, that, for me, is based on insecurity, self-esteem, and loneliness.
- Naomi Campbell
49. Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and the rejected.
- Jimmy Cannon
50. My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.
- Truman Capote
51. Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
- Thomas Carlyle
52. You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world’s happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.
- Dale Carnegie
53. It is said of a lonely man that he does not appreciate the life of society. This is like saying he hates hiking because he dislikes walking in thick forest on a dark night.
- Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
54. Once we have resolved only to see those who will treat us morally and virtuously, reasonably, and truthfully, without treating conventions, vanities, and ceremonials as anything other than props of polite society, we will have to live more or less on our own.
- Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
55. People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.
- Anton Checkov
56. A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
- John Cheever
57. If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
- Anton Chekhov
58. People drain me, even the closest of friends; and, I find loneliness to be the best state in the union to live in.
- Margaret Cho
59. I believe a lot of disease comes from anxiety, loneliness.
- Tom Cochrane
60. Some people fail to see neglect and loneliness as abuse, but they are.
- Loretta Cody
61. I spend so much time living by myself—mostly in hotels—and I pick up cats when I’m feeling particularly lonely.
- Penelope Cruz
62. So lonely ’twas that God himself scarce seemed there to be.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
63. Loneliness is the universal problem of rich people.
- Joan Collins
64. To dare to live alone is the rarest courage, since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
- Charles Caleb Colton
65. The lonely become either thoughtful or empty.
- Mason Cooley
66. The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
- Cyril Connolly
67. Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely, themselves, it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
- Joseph Conrad
68. We live, as we dream—alone.
- Joseph Conrad
69. Loneliness seems to have become the great American disease.
- John Corry
70. The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
- Norman Cousins
71. I don’t have time for superficial friends. I suppose if you’re really lonely, you can call a superficial friend; but, otherwise, what’s the point?
- Courteney Cox
72. I’m pretty social, so it’s hard for me to find solitude; but, I need to have solitude to write.
- Catie Curtis
73. I don’t have a sidekick—no Ed McMahon. So, when I go out there, I’m lonely. It’s scary.
- Carson Daly
74. Fame doesn’t end loneliness.
- Claire Danes
75. Acting is the greatest answer to my loneliness that I have found.
- Claire Danes
76. I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line, facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man—public opinion.
- Clarence Darrow
77. To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
- Bette Davis
78. All we ask is to be let alone.
- Jefferson Davis
79. We have all known the long loneliness; and, we have found that the answer is community.
- Dorothy Day
80. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
- Alain de Botton
81. Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that’s all you have. Being a good actor isn’t easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I’m done.
- James Dean
82. What torments my soul is its loneliness. The more it expands among friends and the daily habits or pleasures, the more, it seems to me, it flees me and retires into its fortress. The poet who lives in solitude, but who produces much, is the one who enjoys those treasures we bear in our bosom, but which forsake us when we give ourselves to others. When one yields oneself completely to one’s soul, it opens itself to one; and, then, it is that the capricious thing allows one the greatest of good fortunes … that of sympathizing with others, of studying itself, of painting itself constantly in its works.
- Eugene Delacroix
83. Yoga is a way to freedom. By its constant practice, we can free ourselves from fear, anguish, and loneliness.
- Indra Devi
84. There were times when he could not read the face he had studied so long, and when this lonely girl was a greater mystery to him than any woman of the world …
- Charles Dickens
85. But, you see, that’s the gilded prison of fashion. We’re riding in private jets; and, meantime, I was so incredibly, painfully sad and lonely.
- Janice Dickinson
86. The surest sign of age is loneliness.
- Annie Dillard
87. No man is an Island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
- John Donne
88. Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is, in reality, the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.
- Lou Dorfsman
89. For the first time, I lived alone … in a luxury apartment on Sunset Strip. For a few days, I loved the idea; but, I got lonely and restless.
- Patty Duke
90. Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
- Lawrence Durrell
91. I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time—those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
- Lawrence Durrell
92. You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.
- Wayne Dyer
93. Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things, knows not the livid loneliness of fear.
- Amelia Earhart
94. It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.
- Albert Einstein
95. Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.
- Albert Einstein
96. I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
- Albert Einstein
97. What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
- George Eliot
98. Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
99. When you close your doors and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within; and, your genius is within. And, what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
- Epictetus
100. There is none more lonely than the man who loves only himself.
- Abraham Ibn Esra
101. Writing is a lonely job unless you’re a drinker, in which case you always have a friend within reach.
- Emilio Estevez
102. I’ve sold my soul for freedom. It’s lonely, but it’s sweet.
- Melissa Etheridge
103. Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causes you to bump into people not going your way.
- Edna Ferber
104. In cities, no one is quiet, but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet, but few are lonely.
- Geoffrey F. Fisher
105. It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject; the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual.
- Alexander Fleming
106. Judging is a lonely job in which a man is, as near as may be, an island entire.
- Abe Fortas
107. At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.
- Brendan Francis
108. The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy amidst the simple beauty of nature.
- Anne Frank
109. One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house.
- Robert Frost
110. Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.
- Robert Frost
111. We enter the world alone; we leave the world alone.
- James A. Froude
112. Every loneliness was given a dream to join!
- Mariana Fulger
113. I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I’ve done. But, the process is quite lonely and quite painful.
- Vincent Gallo
114. If I’m such a legend, then why am I so lonely? Let me tell you, legends are all very well if you’ve got somebody around who loves you.
- Judy Garland
115. It’s lonely and cold on the top … lonely and cold.
- Judy Garland
116. I would have to say loneliness is next to uncleanliness.
- Janeane Garofalo
117. There are times when it has been quite difficult for us. Even when you are traveling with family, you can get lonely, at times, on the road, and with the trips and the shows to do.
- Robin Gibb
118. The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.
- Edward Gibbon
119. I was never less alone than when by myself.
- Edward Gibbon
120. Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.
- Kahlil Gibran
121. And, I have found both freedom and safety in my madness. Freedom of loneliness and safety from being understood. For those who understand us enslave something in us.
- Kahlil Gibran
122. The voice of life in me cannot reach the ear of life in you; but, let us talk that we may not feel lonely.
- Kahlil Gibran
123. Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
- Kahlil Gibran
124. I’m alone, but I’m never lonely.
- Helen Gibson
125. Most performers don’t admit this, because it sounds negative and performers are not supposed to be negative, but when I was on the road, I was lonely.
- Tom Glazer
126. To be alone is to be different; to be different is to be alone.
- Suzanne Gordon
127. The … common problem with working at a startup … is that it’s very lonely. You do nothing but work and sleep and no one understands the situation you are in, and friends don’t know why it takes three days for you to call them back.
- Paul Graham
128. Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
- Germaine Greer
129. I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.
- Hafez
130. What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.
- Dag Hammarskjöld
131. Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
- Dag Hammarskjöld
132. Friendship needs no words—it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
- Dag Hammarskjöld
133. It is a lonely existence to be a child with a disability which no-one can see or understand; you exasperate your teachers, you disappoint your parents, and, worst of all, you know that you are not just stupid.
- Susan Hampshire
134. There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.
- Tom Hanks
135. A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men—and people in general.
- Lorraine Hansberry
136. The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
- Lorraine Hansberry
137. Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, except greed, which does make us more vulnerable than loneliness.
- Thomas Harris
138. Guys aren’t apt to call up each other and say, “Hi, I’m lonely … let’s talk.” They’re much more inclined to join a baseball fantasy league or participate in a March Madness-type score-guessing group.
- Trip Hawkins
139. The take-home message is that feelings of loneliness are a health risk, in that the lonelier you are, the higher your blood pressure. And, we know that high blood pressure has all kinds of negative consequences.
- Louise Hawkley
140. Loneliness, the clearest of crystal insight into your own soul; it’s the fear of one’s own self that haunts the lonely.
- Keith Haynie
141. Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.
- Lillian Hellman
142. Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
- Ernest Hemingway
143. Humans are almost always lonely.
- Frank Herbert
144. When you’re away, I’m restless, lonely,
Wretched, bored, dejected;
Only here’s the rub, my darling dear,
I feel the same when you’re near.
- Samuel Hoffenstein
145. It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
- Eric Hoffer
146. With some people, solitariness is an escape, not from others, but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
- Eric Hoffer
147. There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
- Eric Hoffer
148. It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
149. When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I’d be alone a lot. Basically, we all are. Loneliness comes with life.
- Whitney Houston
150. Being a painter is a lonely, desolate life; but, I learned by observing people, observing conditions around me, the way things worked. And, I’ve found that painting—which I still do—has helped me a great deal as an actor. There’s a surprising amount in common.
- John Hurt
151. My inspiration are the woman, friendship, and loneliness.
- Enrique Iglesias
152. If I only dated actresses, I’d be a very lonely man.
- Joshua Jackson
153. There were times when I had great times with my brothers, pillow fights and things; but, I … used to always cry from loneliness.
- Michael Jackson
154. There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high, it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars … But somewhere this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many. Overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable … It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
- Kay Jamison
155. Marriage is good for those who are afraid to sleep alone at night.
- Saint Jerome
156. My life is spent in a perpetual alternation between two rhythms, the rhythm of attracting people for fear I may be lonely, and the rhythm of trying to get rid of them because I know that I am bored.
- C. E. M. Joad
157. LA’s a very hard place to be unless you have people there that love you. It can be very, very lonely; and it can eat you up if you don’t take care of yourself. In LA, nobody wants to talk to each other; everybody’s giving each other catty looks.
- Scarlett Johansson
158. If you write fiction, you’re by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don’t have to explain anything to anybody. But, when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you’re not lonely anymore.
- Denis Johnson
159. If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.
- Samuel Johnson
160. On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people, and then I go home alone.
- Janis Joplin
161. Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely. All you really have that really matters are feelings. That’s what music is to me.
- Janis Joplin
162. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
- Carl Jung
163. My 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 Kafka
164. I’d rather be lonely than happy with somebody else.
- Gus Kahn
165. Writing can be a very solitary business. It’s you, sat at a desk, typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes, and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
- Paul Kane
166. 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.
- Yousuf Karsh
167. The best he can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe he has been.
- George F. Kennan
168. Loneliness—If you find yourself struggling with loneliness, you’re not alone. And, yet you are alone. So very alone.
- Larry Kersten
169. Elitism—It’s lonely at the top. But it’s comforting to look down upon everyone at the bottom.
- Larry Kersten
170. To transform the emptiness of loneliness to the fullness of aloneness. Ah, that is the secret of life.
- Sunita Khosla
171. Sometimes, when I got a little lonely or depressed, I would go down to the supermarket in hopes of being recognized. I would squeeze a few melons and look around surreptitiously. Raise my voice if I had to.
- Ted Knight
172. Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer’s life.
- Jerzy Kosinski
173. Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
- Milan Kundera
174. Being a good host offsets the deprivation and loneliness of my youth.
- Alan Ladd
175. The only place I’ve felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There’s something in the water there that connects me to that place. There’s also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I’ve never been able to shake.
- Jessica Lange
176. I’ve put in as many as 40 weeks a year on stage. It is lonely and restricted, as all artistic life must necessarily be.
- Lillie Langtry
177. I am happy as happiness goes, for a woman who has so many memories and who lives the lonely life of an actress.
- Lillie Langtry
178. Every time I look at you, I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.
- Oscar Levant
179. Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet.
- Abraham Lincoln
180. 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.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
181. We must relearn to be alone.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
182. 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.
- Mario Vargas Llosa
183. I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key; but, a lot of it was purely hell.
- Audre Lorde
184. We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.
- Maurice Maerterlinck
185. It’s a terrible thing to be alone—yes it is—it is—but don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath—as terrible as you like—but a mask.
- Katherine Mansfield
186. I was certainly neurotic, extremely neurotic, during all my first twenty years—depressed, terribly unhappy, lonely, isolated, self-rejecting, and so on—but, in theory, it should have been much worse.
- Abraham Maslow
187. We seek, pitifully, to convey to others the treasures of our heart; but, they have not the power to accept them; and, so we go lonely, side by side, but not together, unable to know our fellows, and unknown by them.
- William Somerset Maugham
188. All men are lonely. But, sometimes, it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us, almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest; and, our writers have been great wanderers.
- Carson McCullers
189. I live with the people I create; and, it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
- Carson McCullers
190. You’re only lonely if you’re not there for you.
- Philip C. McGraw
191. Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
- Thomas Merton
192. If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.
- Alice Meynell
193. Honestly, I have had to live like a high priestess in this show. It is a very, very lonely life. When you work the way I work—that means hard—there’s no time for play.
- Ann Miller
194. An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
- Henry Miller
195. The final outcome cannot be known, either to the originator of a new theory, or to his colleagues and critics, who are bent on falsifying it. Thus, the scientific innovator may feel all the more lonely and uncertain.
- Peter D. Mitchell
196. Meanwhile, the originator of a theory may have a very lonely time, especially if his colleagues find his views of nature unfamiliar and difficult to appreciate.
- Peter D. Mitchell
197. In our extreme youth, in our most humiliating sorrow, we think we are alone. When we are older, we find that others have suffered, too.
- Suzanne Moarny
198. The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family “gets together” alone.
- Ashley Montagu
199. No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
- Christopher Morley
200. Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
- Christopher Morley
201. The loneliest woman in the world is the woman without a close woman friend.
- Toni Morrison
202. I have friends, who I get along with, who I know get very uncomfortable being alone, unless they’re with people, talking all the time. Whether it’s on the phone, or in person, they’re never by themselves; whereas, I could be alone for months.
- Viggo Mortensen
203. Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.
- Anna Neagle
204. People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.
- Joseph Fort Newton
205. The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
- Friedrich Nietszche
206. The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
- Friedrich Nietszche
207. The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.
- Richard M. Nixon
208. When everything is lonely, I can be my best friend.
- Conan Oberst
209. Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.
- Eugene O’Neill
210. True artists are prophets. I don’t want to be that prophetic in that sense because it’s so lonely.
- Yoko Ono
211. We two are, to ourselves, a crowd.
- Ovid
212. I’m complicated, sentimental, lovable, honest, loyal, decent, generous, likable, and lonely. My personality is not split; it’s shredded.
- Jack Paar
213. Many times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small.
- Gordon Parks
214. Sometimes I get lonely, but it’s nice to be alone.
- Tatjana Patitz
215. A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and, by and by, a grown man—the one he used to be.
- Cesare Pavese
216. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
- Octavio Paz
217. I like the idea of being alone. I like the idea of often being alone in all aspects of my life. I like to feel lonely. I like to need things.
- Robert Plant
218. When everyone leaves you, it’s loneliness you feel; when you leave everyone else, it’s solitude.
- Alfred Polgar
219. Command is lonely.
- Colin Powell
220. Stardom is difficult. It is a lonely, alienated position. You sometimes put yourself on a different plane than everyone else. That causes problems.
- Lisa Marie Presley
221. I had anything but a happy childhood. Two words: lonely and deep. I was very lonely and way too deep for someone so young.
- Lisa Marie Presley
222. In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.
- Ayn Rand
223. That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don’t have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might, training for an orchestra.
- Anne Rice
224. It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times.
- Thomas Brackett Reed
225. If you are afraid of being lonely, don’t try to be right.
- Jules Renard
226. Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.
- Henry Rollins
227. Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner; but, I feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people than I feel on my own.
- Henry Rollins
228. To be an adult is to be alone.
- Jean Rostand
229. Loneliness is part of being human. It reminds us that we are not complete in ourselves.
- David Runcorn
230. Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
- Bertrand Russell
231. People tell me there are a lot of guys like me, which doesn’t explain why I’m lonely.
- Mort Sahl
232. Writing is an incredibly lonely job.
- R. A. Salvatore
233. Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
- May Sarton
234. If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
235. To live alone is the fate of all great souls.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
236. 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.
- Jason Schwartzman
237. As far as loneliness, I feel Los Angeles and its layout, having to drive everywhere—it is a lonely place. It’s an isolated city in that respect because you’re driving to places alone listening to the radio.
- Jason Schwartzman
238. We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
- Albert Schweitzer
239. When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone.
- Walter Scott
240. I really love baseball. The guys and the game; and, I love the challenge of describing things. The only thing I hate—and, I know you have to be realistic and pay the bills in this life—is the loneliness on the road.
- Vin Scully
241. What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.
- Chief Seattle
242. When people become lonely and isolated, whatever social skills they have tend to atrophy from misuse.
- Chris Segrin
243. For many lonely people, it’s not as simple as picking up the phone.
- Chris Segrin
244. But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.
- William Sharp
245. The writer works in a lonely way.
- Irwin Shaw
246. They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.
- Philip Sidney
247. The sky is one whole, the water another; and, between those two infinities, the soul of man is in loneliness.
- Henryk Sienkiewicz
248. I’ve shut myself inside these walls; and, I’m going to be a very lonely old lady if I’m not careful.
- Danielle Steel
249. In utter loneliness, a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
- John Steinbeck
250. 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.
- Robert Louis Steveson
251. To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But, it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
- Anna Louise Strong
252. You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all, because everybody’s an expert on that one.
- Theodore Sturgeon
253. Reading—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
- William Styron
254. I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices … I mean, writing is a lonely business.
- Donna Tartt
255. I discovered that it was a lonely world being a solo artist. Then, I started working with another solo artist, Rod Stewart; and, he used to tell me how lonely he was!
- Andy Taylor
256. Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.
- Tecumseh
257. Of my friends, I am the only one left.
- Terence
258. Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
- Mother Teresa
259. 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.
- Mother Teresa
260. The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody.
- Mother Teresa
261. Being prime minister is a lonely job … you cannot lead from the crowd.
- Margaret Thatcher
262. There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
- Alexander Theroux
263. It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
- Paul Theroux
264. I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
- Henry David Thoreau
265. Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then, and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.
- James Thurber
266. Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
- Paul Tillich
267. Remember we’re all in this alone.
- Lily Tomlin
268. Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.
- Paul Tournier
269. Be good and you will be lonely.
- Mark Twain
270. The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
- Mark Twain
271. There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
- Mark Twain
272. Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.
- Liv Ullmann
273. Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.
- Nancy Witcher Astor Viscountess
274. What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But, the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
- Kurt Vonnegut
275. Loneliness is the ultimate poverty.
- Abigail van Buren
276. One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
- Vincent van Gogh
277. I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it’s lonely work. You die, you die alone. It’s you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.
- Jim Varney
278. The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.
- Jules Verne
279. The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society, or one’s people, that has not previously been taken into account.
- Alice Walker
280. For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and, one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.
- Alice Walker
281. We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around, feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?
- David Foster Wallace
282. The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
- David Foster Wallace
283. When people are lonely they stoop to any companionship.
- Lew Wallace
284. Skillful listening is the best remedy for loneliness, loquaciousness, and laryngitis.
- William Arthur Ward
285. Lone eagles, soaring in the clouds, fly with silent, peaceful poise,
While turkeys, in their earth-bound crowds, fill the atmosphere with noise.
- William Arthur Ward
286. No matter how lonely you get, or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There’s nothing wrong with being alone.
- Wendy Wasserstein
287. We’re all outsiders in a way. We’re all alone and can become very lonely.
- Hugo Weaving
288. We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.
- Orson Welles
289. Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.
- Joss Whedon
290. I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
- Walt Whitman
291. What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.
- Richard Wilbur
292. When the sparrow sings its final refrain, the hush is felt nowhere more deeply than in the heart of man.
- Don Williams, Jr.
293. I live alone, and it’s good. I stick on a video, watch telly. I am a bit lonely sometimes; but, I laugh at my own jokes and dance around by myself when I’m making something to eat. I’d like to do a bit more reading maybe. I’ve tried, but somehow I just can’t get into that book thing yet.
- Robbie Williams
294. I was an only child. I did have kind of like a lonely existence. The idea of being a character who is kind of isolated, I can relate to that.
- Robin Williams
295. When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
- Tennessee Williams
296. We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
- Tennessee Williams
297. The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
- Thomas Wolfe
298. Loneliness is, and always has been, the central and inevitable experience of every man.
- Thomas Wolfe
299. The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
- Thomas Wolfe
300. When I was younger, many of my romantic escapades were just a means of simply avoiding being by myself. I was afraid of feeling lonely, afraid I wouldn’t know what to say to myself.
- Michael Zaslow
CONCLUSION
What I gathered from all of the above are the following, albeit sometimes conflicting, generalized conclusions:
1. Loneliness is a common part of the human condition.
2. Loneliness is the worst thing that can happen to us.
3. Loneliness is the best thing that can happen to us.
4. No one is immune (e.g., rock stars, actors, supermodels, writers, and politicians).
5. Being alone is not at all the same thing as being lonely.
6. According to some: Solitude, good. Loneliness, bad.
7. The worst of it can be kept at bay by staying busy.
8. To become great at anything requires a good amount of it.
9. Loneliness is now being studied by top psychologists!
10. Psychologists believe loneliness is both normal and useful.
If the richest, most powerful, most famous, most attractive, most principled, most intelligent, and most successful people in the world all suffer from loneliness (or enjoy long periods of solitude, depending on how you look at it), is it really so bad?
At least we should no longer feel so isolated—as if we are the only ones who ever felt that way—because now we know we are, as they say, “in good company!” ; )
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