Quotes on Loneliness

You spoke about things they couldn't see and so they laughed. Yet to row up the dark river against the current, to take the unknown road blindly, stubbornly, and to search for words rooted like the knotted olive tree- let them laugh. And to yearn for the other world to inhabit today's suffocating loneliness, this ravaged present- let them be.

It's often just enough to be with someone. I don't need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You're not alone.

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

If we don't accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain't true.

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.

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.

Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude - the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude.

It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...

Real love is not an escape from loneliness, real love is an overflowing aloneness. One is so happy in being alone that one wud like to share.

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.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

If from society we learn to live, solitude should teach us how to die.

Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.

Any man who is really a man must learn to be alone in the midst of others, to think alone for others, and, if necessary, against others.

Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness than to tread the silent and deserted scene of former throng and pageant.

"I fly from pleasure," said the prince, "because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others."

We the living, should not think of the dead as lonely because if they could speak to us, they would say: "Do not weep for me, earth was not my true country, I was an alien there: I am at Home where everyone comes."

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange.