LONELINESS QUOTES III
quotations about loneliness
The ideal attitude is to be able to live in a way that, no matter what the conditions may be, loneliness is impossible. The mountain-dwellers, suddenly thrown into a great city, would become wretched victims of loneliness. They would long for solitude just as other kinds of lonely people long for company. Without their mountains, without the association that helped to establish their habits, they would feel themselves indeed helpless and alone. The people in the streets are alien, irritating. The huddled buildings are an ache. The noise is a torment. The loss of the familiar they may find so intolerable as to drive them precipitately back.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Loneliness", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
Loneliness is one of the bugbears of mankind. With some people, it is a constant source of unhappiness. They make plans, sometimes exceedingly complex, to keep it at bay. They think that it lies outside. It really lies within their own consciousness.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Loneliness", Reactions and Other Essays
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected.
CHIEF SEATTLE OF THE SUWAMISH TRIBE
letter to President Franklin Pierce
The feeling of loneliness is unique to humans. A tree or a bird may seem to be lonely, but this is an attribute bestowed by the person making the observation. The tree or the bird is incapable of perceiving loneliness. This feeling occurs when a person is alone, and, moved by his emotions, associates his own circumstances with those of the bird or the tree that he sees before him. Since this feeling entails an element of self-examination, it is not a purely objective observation. The feeling of loneliness produced is thus a form of aesthetics, in that while observing one's external environment, one is at the same time examining the self that is located within it, and to a certain extent this is an affirmation of one's own personal worth.
GAO XINGJIAN
speech presented on receiving the Golden Plate Award at the Forty-first International Achievement Summit of the American Academy of Achievement, Jun. 8, 2002
Labor in loneliness is irksome.
MARK TWAIN
The Innocents Abroad
All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Second Foundation
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
The Third Wave
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is as true of men as of dogs.
ERIC HOFFER
"Thoughts of Eric Hoffer", The New York Times Magazine, Apr. 25, 1971
I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.
JOHN STEINBECK
Of Mice and Men
We live as we dream--alone.
JOSEPH CONRAD
Heart of Darkness
Loneliness doesn't have much to do with where you are.
HUGH HEFNER
Esquire, Jun. 2002
Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
The survival of the fittest is going to make some man very lonesome some day.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself.
HAROLD PINTER
Tea Party
Late at night, when you're so lonely,
your shoulders curl toward the center of your body,
you call no one and you don't call out.
This is dignity. This is the pure loneliness
that made Christ think he was God.
This is why lunatics smile at their thoughts.
MICHAEL RYAN
"The Pure Loneliness", New and Selected Poems
Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Sputnik Sweetheart
Alone, amid the wide and desert world,
Without some heart to echo to our own,
How fev'rish all the pomp and play of life!--
There is a solitude that lifts the mind
To lofty things -- seclusion from the rush
And stir of the unfeeling crowd, whose days
Reap scarce a thought to sanctify their flight.
Far from the city din, may Wisdom haunt
Her lone retreats, and yet not live alone;
For is there not the fellowship of books
Divine, the company of kindling thoughts,
And all that Nature yields a grateful mind?
This is not loneliness: to look around
The peopled world, and 'mong its myriad hearts
To find no sympathies to nurse our own,
Oh, this is loneliness! that solitude
Of soul, which makes the world a desert seem.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY
"Loneliness", Religion and Poetry: Being Selections Spiritual and Moral