quotes about Loneliness
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Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.
-- A. E. Coppard -
Being human is the most terrible loneliness in the universe.
-- A.A. AttanasioSource : A. A. Attanasio (1997). “The Dragon and the Unicorn”, GuildAmerica Books
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SO the richest are often the poorest as this saying goes, "Loneliness is the ultimate poverty"
-- Abigail Van Buren -
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None of the prophets old, So lofty or so bold! No form of danger shakes his dauntless breast; In loneliness sublime He dares confront the time, And speak the truth, and give the world no rest No kingly threat can cowardize his breath, He with majestic step goes forth to meet his death.
-- Abraham ColesSource : Abraham Coles (1885). “The Life and Teachings of Our Lord in Verse: Being a Complete Harmonized Exposition of the Four Gospels, with Original Notes Textual Index, Etc. Two Volumes in One, Vol. 1 -- The Evangel (second Edition), Vol. 2 -- The Light of the World”
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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
-- Adam GopnikSource : Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated
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You are the architect of your own loneliness.
-- Adam ShankmanSource : Henry Thomas Hamblin (2009). “The Power of Thought”, p.4, The Floating Press
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Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn't worry about the consequences. Maybe a first love exists to remind you to be brave in the moment, to stand up for your feelings, instead of shrinking back in the face of potential loneliness.
-- Adriana Trigiani -
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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.
-- Adrien BrodySource : "Profile: Adrien Brody" by John Patterson, www.theguardian.com. March 29, 2003.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
-- Adrienne Rich -
The loneliness caused by not hearing Ren's voice... I felt it deep in the night. I felt it deeper than anyone else. Even now at times I look back. In this ordinary life without Ren, I think my life with him was like a dream. Especially on a snowy night like this. On a night as cold as this. Someone keep this guy warm for me, please.
-- Ai Yazawa -
Most of the world's great souls have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness... Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
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There is a strain of loneliness infecting many Christians, which only the presence of God can cure.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
It takes loneliness in oneself to recognize it in another.
-- Aimee Carter -
The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace. Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.
-- Ajay Naidu -
There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.
-- Ajay Naidu -
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Loneliness is everything it's cracked up to be.
-- Alan Alda -
Being a good host offsets the deprivation and loneliness of my youth
-- Alan Ladd -
It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.
-- Albert Einstein -
We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
-- Albert Schweitzer -
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In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.
-- Alberto Giacometti -
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
-- Aldous Huxley -
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
-- Aldous Huxley -
I did not love you out or boredom or loneliness or caprice. I loved you because the desire for you was stronger than any happiness.
-- Alessandro BariccoSource : Alessandro Baricco (2013). “Ocean Sea”, p.182, Canongate Books
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In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.
-- Alex Haley -
There are some solitary wretches who seem to have left the rest of mankind, only, as Eve left Adam, to meet the devil in private.
-- Alexander Pope -
Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
-- Alexander Theroux -
There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
-- Alexander Theroux -
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When everyone leaves you it's loneliness you feel, when you leave everyone else it's solitude.
-- Alfred Polgar -
I am lonesome so regular it's like a job I gotta report to every day.
-- Alice Childress -
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.
-- Alice Meynell -
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 MeynellSource : Alice Meynell, Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell (1899). “The Spirit of Place, and Other Essays”
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Our cities with their swollen populations and cliff dwelling high-rise buildings are breeding places for loneliness. Neighborhoods crumble under the housing development bulldozers and families scatter in pursuit of jobs and professions everywhere. In a world of wheels, old and comfortable groupings of people have disappeared.
-- Allan Fromme -
Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
-- Alvin Toffler -
O yes, everyone gets lonely some time or other. After all, if we look closer into ourselves, shall we not admit that the warmth from other people comes so sweet to us when it comes, because, we always carry with us the knowledge of the cold loneliness of death?
-- Ama Ata Aidoo -
… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.
-- Amos Oz -
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Bare heights of loneliness...a wilderness whose burning winds sweep over glowing sands, what are they to HIM? Even there He can refresh us, even there He can renew us.
-- Amy Carmichael -
The secret to overcoming a feeling of loneliness is not going outside to meet people. That will only keep you from being alone. The secret is going inside yourself, to realize your true kinship with God and with all the human beings that he created.
-- Amy Grant -
Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me,and drench me in loneliness.
-- Amy Lowell -
My mind swirled with memories of the life I had led. The constant struggle to keep up appearances, the pretenses, the smiles that had been met with tears. The long sleepless nights, the loneliness that cloaked my spirit and turned me into a true ghost.
-- Anchee MinSource : Anchee Min (2004). “Empress Orchid”, Wheeler Publishing, Incorporated
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Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
But when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back. There is no bruise like the bruise loneliness kicks into your spine.
-- Andrea Gibson -
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.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Loneliness is, I think, people's biggest fear, whether they are conscious of it or not.
-- Andrew Stanton -
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Well, being the youngest child and frail, I was left alone a great deal of the time.
-- Andrew Wyeth -
We're all torn between the desire for privacy and the fear of loneliness.
-- Andy Rooney -
I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.
-- Anita Brookner -
We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.
-- Ann Druyan -
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Anfering sex for money is not a profession that glorifies women; it is a profession born of desperation, poverty, alieatioin, and loneliness.
-- Ann Rule -
A valuable lesson I've learned from making music is to never let anyone intimidate me. Every student, celebrity, CEO and math teacher in the world has experienced love, loneliness, fear and embarassment at some point. To understand this is to level an often very lopsided playing field.
-- Anna Nalick -
Loneliness is my least favorite thing about life. The thing that I'm most worried about is just being alone without anybody to care for or someone who will care for me.
-- Anne HathawaySource : Interview with Angelina Jolie, www.interviewmagazine.com. July 27, 2010.
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You sense my loneliness, (...) my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I'm evil, that I don't deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don't stop me, Mother. I'm too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that's all
-- Anne Rice -
Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.
-- Anne Rice -
There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.
-- Anne Rice -
I was trundling around with my inadequacies, and inner pain and loneliness. I yearned, desperately, to be something. I yearned to get out from where I was ... some deep discontent within myself, actually some deep dislike of myself.
-- Anthony Hopkins -
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My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.
-- Anthony SwoffordSource : Anthony Swofford (2008). “Jarhead: A Solder's Story of Modern War”, p.75, Simon and Schuster
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I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.
-- Anzia YezierskaSource : Anzia Yezierska (1923). “Children of Loneliness”
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Everything is freedom and everything is loneliness. Make your choice and let the rest fall away.
-- Ariel Gore -
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
-- Aristotle -
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No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
-- Aristotle -
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
-- Arthur C. ClarkeSource : "Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century". Book by Michio Kaku, 1997.
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It brings spiritual warfare and suffering for the priest as he identifies with those who suffer, and shares the frustrations, anger, and incomprehensibility of that suffering in what it does to those who suffer. The priest shares in these struggles of his suffering people, the uncertainties it brings, the sense of divine abandonment it induces, and the loneliness caused.
-- Arthur Middleton -
No specter assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love.
-- Arthur Schnitzler -
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To live alone is the fate of all great souls.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others...
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Here in a little lonely room I am master of earth and sea, And the planets come to me.
-- Arthur SymonsSource : Arthur Symons, Roger Holdsworth (2003). “Arthur Symons: Selected Writings”, p.59, Psychology Press
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Actually loneliness has a kind of fascination; it's a state of egotistical, inner grace that you can achieve only by standing guard on old, forgotten roads that no one travels anymore.
-- Arturo Pérez-ReverteSource : Arturo Pérez-Reverte (1999). “The Fencing Master”, Harcourt
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When I allow myself to feel all my feelings instead of numbing myself to them, they pass more quickly. I spent my entire life telling everyone I was "OK, damn it." But when you surrender to the [uncomfortable] feelings, there are gifts on the other side: Allowing yourself to feel loneliness forces you to reach out. Letting yourself get angry gives you strength, energy and motivation.
-- Ashley JuddSource : "Ashley's Secret Life". Interview with Laurie Sandell, www.glamour.com. July 9, 2006.
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The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.
-- Ashley Montagu -
When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.
-- Audrey Hepburn -
I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.
-- Audrey Hepburn -
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if you are afraid of loneliness, don't get married
-- August Strindberg -
She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.
-- Ayn Rand -
Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.
-- B. W. PoweSource : "Towards a Canada of Light". Book by B. W. Powe, 2006.
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maybe the lonely places are the only things that make human beings of us all.
-- Babs DealSource : BABS H. DEAL (1968). “THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN”
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Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.
-- Banana Yoshimoto -
Python carries his loneliness in him as if he had eaten clay.
-- Barbara Chase-Riboud -
We can choose to gather to our hearts the thorns of disappointment, failure, loneliness, and dismay in our present situation. Or we can gather the flowers of God's grace, boundless love, abiding presence, and unmatched joy. I choose to gather the flowers.
-- Barbara Johnson -
Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.
-- Barry LopezSource : FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Jul 30, 2014
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It seems to be that loneliness is a small price to pay for peace and quiet.
-- Bart YatesSource : Bart Yates (2006). “The Brothers Bishop”, p.56, Kensington Books
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Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.
-- Bell Hooks -
Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, Emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy. Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness.
-- Benjamin Hoff -
Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness.  Everything has to be filled in, it seems-appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots-but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins.  Then the Groups are joined, the Classes are signed up for, and the Gift-to-Yourself items are bought.  When the Loneliness starts creeping in the door, the Television Set is turned on to make it go away.  But it doesn't go away.  So some of us do instead, and after discarding the emptiness of the Big Congested Mess, we discover the fullness of Nothing.
-- Benjamin Hoff -
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Modern man's difficulties, dangerous beliefs and feelings of loneliness, spiritual emptiness,and personal weakness are caused by his illusions about, and separation from, the natural world.
-- Benjamin Hoff -
... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.
-- Bernard MalamudSource : Bernard Malamud (1967). “A Malamud Reader”, p.46, Macmillan
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A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.
-- Bernard Malamud -
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.
-- Beryl MarkhamSource : Beryl Markham (2015). “West With The Night”, p.182, Hachette UK
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After close to a year of traveling, I had seen things in the world and in myself, both good and bad, that I had never noticed before. I was struggling daily with pride and insecurity, homesickness and loneliness, with the burden of picking up my cross and following Jesus. This journey produced a new hunger for redemption in me.
-- Bethany Dillon -
we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
-- Bill McKibben -
Almost without exception alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.
-- Bill W.Source : Bill W. (1953). “Twelve steps and twelve traditions”, Alcoholics Anonymous World Serv inc
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I am never lonely when I am reading the Bible. Nothing dissolves loneliness like a session with God's Word.
-- Billy Graham -
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You can walk away from your mistakes You can turn your back on what you do Just a little smile is all it takes And you can have your cake and eat it too. Loneliness will get to you somehow But ev'rybody loves you now.
-- Billy Joel -
You got your glory and you paid for it all, you take your pension in loneliness and alcohol.
-- Billy Squier -
I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.
-- BjorkSource : Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
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Loneliness Got a mind of its own The more people around The more you feel alone
-- Bob Dylan -
There are those who worship loneliness, I'm not one of them In this age of fiberglass I'm searching for a gem The crystal ball up on the wall hasn't shown me nothing yet I've paid the price of solitude, but at last I'm out of debt
-- Bob Dylan -
Loneliness, tenderness, high society, notoriety, you fight for the throne and you travel alone.
-- Bob Dylan -
The very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid.
-- Brad Mehldau -