Loneliness Solitude Quotes & Sayings

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self. — May Sarton

See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself. — Criss Jami

He prayed for the recovery of that inward privacy which the purpose of his vigil demanded that he seek: a clean parchment of the spirit whereon the words of a summons might be written in his solitude - if that other Immensurable Loneliness which was God stretched forth Its hand to touch his own tiny human loneliness and to mark his vocation there. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude - both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice - make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells. — Yiyun Li

The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others. — Cesare Pavese

Prepare for a radio, for nothing is silent like the grave — Bangambiki Habyarimana

My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about. — Dwight Yoakam

72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? - No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink - Here you are again, it says, and so am I. — Maggie Nelson

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. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely — Sherry Turkle

Aloneness exaggerates our emotions and sensitivity. — Beth Moore

Sometimes isolation can be shared. — Ken Grimwood

...loneliness is not a function of solitude. — David Foster Wallace

Solitude is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. — Deepak Chopra

The cure for loneliness is solitude. — Marianne Moore

Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices. — Pearl Cleage

Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine. — Honore De Balzac

Isolation, not solitude, breaks men. If I could not find the means to deal with the isolation, then my options were severely limited. I began to call up memories of places, people, events, food-anything I could do to occupy my mind and remind myself that, even if I was being treated like an animal, I was still a living breathing human being. — Shawn Thompson

There is a predictable interlude when the rivals suddenly come together and speak for a second of their common loneliness, thus tritely demonstrating that we really are all the same, though I can't think of any really first-rate film, play, or book that isn't unconsciously dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably different. — Penelope Gilliat

Solitude is one thing and being alone is another. Solitude can be isolation, an escape, an unwanted thing; but to be alone without the burden of life, with that utter freedom in which time/thought has never been, is to be with the universe. In solitude there is despairing loneliness, a sense of being abandoned, lost, craving for some kind of relationship, like a ship lost at sea. All our daily activity leads to this isolation, with its endless conflicts and miseries, and rare joys thrown in. This isolation is corruption, manifested in politics, in business and of course in organized religions. Corruption exists in the very high places and on the very doorstep. To be tied is corruption; any form of attachment leads to it, whether it be to a belief, faith, ideal, experience, or any conclusion. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Not everyone knows how to be alone with others, how to share solitude. We have to help each other to understand how to be in our solitude, so that we can relate to each other without grabbing on to each other. We can be interdependent but not dependent. Loneliness is rejected despondency. Solitude is shared interdependence. — David Spangler

Solitude and loneliness are two separate things. One you choose out of wisdom, the other out of necessity.
-Mark Miller — Mark Miller

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity. — Marilynne Robinson

Paul Tillich - Loneliness & Solitude: "And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain to pray: and when the evening was come, he was alone" - Matthew 14.23.
'He was there alone.' So are we. Man [humankind] is alone because he/[she] is man [human]. In some way every creature is alone ... Loneliness can be conqured only by those who can bear solitude (1973:15 & 20).
To overcome 'our' sense of aloness is a life long pursuite - let us not despair in its pursuite! — Paul Tillich

To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Remember that although the distinction can be difficult to draw, loneliness and solitude are different. — Gretchen Rubin

The heart which has no agenda but God's is the heart at leisure from itself. Its emptiness is filled with the Love of God. Its solitude can be turned into prayer. — Elisabeth Elliot

The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I don't know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days, — Marilynne Robinson

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company. — Elizabeth Bowen

You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies. — Gilles Deleuze

In a society where people are obsessed with personal space, dogs have come to serve as welcome, neo-human mediators of loneliness and solitude. — Okey Ndibe

The endless ocean was his sole companion , and on some deeply sentimental level, it seemed sufficient. Almost apt. He aligned himself with Thoreau and Tolstoy, he felt like their peers. The kinship with nature devoted humans to a mythical state, a heightened persona beyond the reach of mere mortals. At least that was what he told himself on the lonely nights when insomnia played on his fears and the howling wind pierced through his soul. — Adelheid Manefeldt

It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching. — Lauren Groff

The association between failure, loneliness, and solitude is so strong in our culture that people often find it difficult to believe that there are some who like being by themselves. — Suzanne Gordon

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)
' Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness. — Thomas De Quincey

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. — Peter Hessler

But the most dangerous thing that camp had taught me was the awful lesson of country living: out there, in the open, in the quiet, all the emptiness pressed itself up against you, pawed at the very center of your heart, convinced you to make friends with loneliness. — Kaitlyn Greenidge

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. — Rainer Maria Rilke

One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well. — Karl Kraus

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate. — Octavio Paz

If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him. — Criss Jami

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. — Olivia Laing

Everybody in the world wants to be understood and to have others appreciate them.
Being different is scary. Solitude is pain and loneliness. — Mizuki Nomura

The very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid. — Brad Mehldau

When everyone leaves you it's loneliness you feel, when you leave everyone else it's solitude. — Alfred Polgar

Loneliness is painful; Solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community ... — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. — Olivia Laing

The rhythm of solitude, once so intimidating, began to feel comfortable. Aloneness, I was learning, does not have to equal loneliness. — John Grogan

Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe. — Neel Burton

It's bad to be unable to stand solitude. — Leo Tolstoy

A lonely day is God's way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you. — Criss Jami

If solitude feels painful, it's only because we don't know how to be alone. — Michael Harris

It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you? — Kazuo Ishiguro

I seek the city because there is nothing sweeter than not being alone in your loneliness. — Charlotte Eriksson

In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness. — Claudia Rankine

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being. — Hermann Hesse

When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. — Virginia Woolf

You can do beautiful things with your friends; you can do beautiful things when you are all alone! In togetherness, listen to the music of the crowds; in solitude, listen to the music of the silence! Be neither afraid of the crowds, nor of the loneliness, because both are blessings! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable. — Allen Shawn

You are alone because you were born alone. And though you were born alone, you found a reason and the strength to shake yourself, though as helpless as you were at birth, for the whole universe to hear and know that you have not just arrived, but you are healthy, and you commended and moved things and people around you with your cry, even as an infant! And though it all seems you are alone, note that once you can breathe, you are never alone! Smile, for there is an indomitable power within you, given to you by God! Realize your God, realize your power! Awake and realize your true strength and the strong power within you! Face life and do not just challenge the challenges in life but conquer them with all boldness and fortitude. Step by step, complete the steps! It is always not all that easy, but, be strong and beat life no matter what! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself. — David Ignatow

I didn't think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love - abject lonliness - is not alright. — Jonathan Ames

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.
Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace — Dean Koontz

...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group — Shirley Jackson

Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all. Your will find yourself, and God will find you in new ways. Silence also brings Sabbath to you. It completes solitude, for without it you cannot be alone. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence we come to attend. Lastly, fasting is done that we many consciously experience the direct sustenance of God to our body and our whole person. — Dallas Willard

Loneliness is just space expanding around you. Trust uncertainty. Sadness is life holding you in its hands and changing you. Make solitude your home. — Rachel Corbett

But if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness. — Sherry Turkle

But the solitude in Ohio is different from that of most other places. There is a certain silence to it, a certain loneliness. — Pittacus Lore

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved. — Eileen Myles

I know exactly what my future looks like and I'm okay with it. I'm happy to live in solitude. I'm not afraid of spending the rest of my life in the company of my own person. I do not afraid loneliness. — Tahereh Mafi

You are alone,
So alone,
You speak back to silence.
People call it loneliness,
You call it solitude,
Different words,
Meaning the same pain. — Jenim Dibie

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone. — George Gordon Byron

I've never minded solitude. For a writer, it's a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness. — Laurie Graham

I like to make a distinction between solitude and being alone. Alone signifies loneliness, whereas solitude means really connecting with yourself. — Deepak Chopra

He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. — Richard Preston

He could remember a time when the loneliness of death had terrified him, when the idea of it was insupportable. He used to feel that if his wife could but lie in the same coffin with him, his body would not be so insensible that the nearness of hers would not give it comfort. But now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth. One — Willa Cather

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn't even begin to solve. — Kate Atkinson

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends. — Vincent Van Gogh

My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that's worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to? — Charlotte Eriksson

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach. — Philip Larkin

My aloneness had never bothered me; I hadn't even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company. — Linda Olsson

Solitude was in its own way a balm for loneliness. — Diana Gabaldon

On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone

It must have been
the eighth day.

A day the scribes and Pharisees conveniently
left out.

Adam was either inspecting goats
or naming the birds

when something pinched
my side.

I had to stop pruning the tree of knowledge
to catch my breath.

God had taken a long weekend.

At first I thought the solitude of gardening
was going to my head.

Was it loneliness?
An omen? A vision?

For a moment I thought I would
ascend.

Then I realized it was just a rib
missing.

How you found your way in
along the banks of the third river

I will never know
but I still shiver to recall

how perfectly your fingers
fell into place

along the ridges
of my ribcage.

Go ahead, Love,
take every last bone.

Make of me
what you will. — Nancy Boutilier

Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused. — Dean Koontz

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down. — Sylvia Plath

Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. — Hermann Hesse

That's what meditation is all about, to be capable of being alone. And remember, aloneness is not loneliness. Loneliness is the state of the person who cannot live alone; loneliness means you are dependent on the crowd, on the other. Aloneness means you are happy with yourself, you are not dependent on anybody. The moment you are not dependent you are an emperor, you are a god, a goddess. Now you have something to share, you can go into the world. — Osho

Poems can get
sleepless too

and become

the loneliest thing
in the universe. — Sanober Khan

Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness. — Orhan Pamuk

The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.
We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique. — Richard Rohr

Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one's person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others. That is why, to me, poetry is one of the most vital treasures that humanity possesses; it is a bridge between separated souls. — Brendan Kennelly

I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

Although he had through the memories learned about the pain of loss and loneliness, now he gained too, an understanding of solitude and its joy. — Lois Lowry

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society. — Henry David Thoreau

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart. — Albert Camus

And for this you must have quiet and solitude. But society does not allow you to have them. You must be with people, outwardly active at all costs. If you are alone you are considered antisocial or peculiar, or you are afraid of your own loneliness. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Courage looks you straight in the eye. She is not impressed with power trippers, and she knows first aid. Courage is not afraid to weep, and she is not afraid to pray, even when she is not sure who she is praying to. When she walks it is clear she has made the journey from loneliness to solitude. The people who told me she was stern were not lying. they just forgot to mention she was kind. — J. Ruth Gendler