Quotes on Loneliness

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

Of all the diseases I have known, loneliness is the worst.

Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.

It is better to be lonely than allow people who are not going anywhere keep you from your destiny.

The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty—it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.

When I went through my confirmation hearing to serve as surgeon general they asked me what my priorities would be and I didn't list loneliness in that priority list because it was not one at the time.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

I've never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I've only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

It's so kind of you to want to visit me in my loneliness. - The Wicked Witch of the West. Now I know I have a heart, because it's breaking. - The Tin Woodsman Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours.

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.

My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.

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.

We come together only to go apart again. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle & misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. The law of life. No sense in battling against it.

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.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Loneliness is the worst pain in this world. It constantly eats away the person's heart, and can cause the person to hate, to feel enraged. It is like a wound of the heart; the type of wounds that cannot go away with a kiss or a hug. The only thing that can make this great pain go away is love and compassion, another human heart to pull them out of this hell.

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.

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

When it comes to our relationship with loneliness, specifically, it's important to understand how our relative introversion or extroversion informs our preference for social interaction.