A collection of quotes on and about loneliness.

 

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” 

Honore De Balzac

 

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.” 

Edgar Allan Poe

 

“All great and precious things are lonely.” 

John Steinbeck

 

“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.” 

Charlotte Bronte

 

“We live as we dream--alone....” 

Joseph Conrad

 

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.” 

Aldous Huxley

 

“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.” 

Robert Frost

 

 “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.” 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.” 

D.H. Lawrence

 

“It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.” 

D.H. Lawrence

 

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” 

Rudyard Kipling

 

“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.” 

Fyodor Dosteyevsky

 

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” 

Edith Wharton

 

“Be good and you will be lonesome.” 

Mark Twain

 

“My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.” 

Kahlil Gibran

 

“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone.” 

Lord Byron

 

“Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms” 

Guy de Maupassant

 

“Two turtle doves will show thee
Where my cold ashes lie
And sadly murmuring tell thee
How in tears I did die” 

Nikolai Gogol

 

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.” 

Anais Nin

 

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” 

George Eliot

 

“There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.” 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?” 

Henrik Ibsen

 

“I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” 

Franz Kafka

 

“I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me…” 

Louisa May Alcott

 

“In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.” 

Sherwood Anderson

 

“The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.” 

D.H. Lawrence

 

“I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.” 

Ford Madox Ford

 

“If I could always read I should never feel the want of company.” 

Lord Byron

 

“. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.” 

Virginia Woolf