Quotes about loneliness

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

— Georges Bernanos

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

All men's misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone.

— Jean De La Bruyere

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

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. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.

— Joseph Conrad

The eternal quest of the human being is to shatter his loneliness.

— Norman Cousins

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

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.

— Wayne Dyer

It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.

— Albert Einstein

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is none more lonely than the man who loves only himself.

— Abraham Ibn Esra

In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely.

— Geoffrey F. Fisher

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self.

— Brendan Francis

One aged man -- one man -- can't fill a house.

— Robert Frost

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

— James A. Froude

I was never less alone than when by myself.

— Edward Gibbon

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 Hammarskjold

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone.

— Janis Joplin

The essence of this man [Richard M. Nixon] is loneliness.

— Henry Kissinger

Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.

— Oscar Levant

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 Maeterlinck

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

To most people loneliness is a doom. Yet loneliness is the very thing which God has chosen to be one of the schools of training for His very own. It is the fire that sheds the dross and reveals the gold.

— Bernard M. Martin

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

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

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

People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.

— Joseph Fort Newton

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

— Eugene O'Neill

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

Strife is better than loneliness.

— Irish Proverb

Loneliness breaks the spirit.

— Jewish Proverb

If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone.

— Sir Walter Scott

It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night.

— William Sutton

Of my friends I am the only one left.

— Terence

Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

— Paul Tillich

We're all in this alone.

— Lily Tomlin

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

Be good and you will be lonely.

— Mark Twain

We are most of us very lonely in this world; you who have any who love you, cling to them and thank God.

— Source Unknown

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

When people are lonely they stoop to any companionship.

— Lew Wallace

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

— Walt Whitman

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

— Tennessee Williams

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

— Tennessee Williams

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

— Thomas Wolfe

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

— Janet Fitch

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

When you're a real introvert like me and you've been lonely for a while, and then you find someone who understands you, you become really attached to them. It's a real disease.

— Lana Del Rey

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

— Germaine Greer

I missed you, when u didn't... I died... ! you missed me the way I didn't.

— mirza sharafat hussain zarafshan

The street of dream is not in my mind so that it can get erased. It stays in my heart for more than that circulate inside it.

— mirza sharafat hussain zarafshan

It is raining, perhaps clouds voiding their deepest longings! Upon the streams I have drove those paper boats to the farthest. Listening to the lonely drops of rain I am trying in vain to sing melodious, Alas the voice ends deep within! Were you the song within? O my dear, but I know you are silence that sings wordless, a melody hummed nameless!

— Preeth Nambiar