Loneliness quotes bring you comfort. Feeling alone can come about at the most inopportune times. Whether you miss hanging out with friends or on the commute to work, loneliness can still strike!
Loneliness is an emotion that’s been with us since the dawn of mankind. Therefore, many great loneliness quotes have been penned throughout the years. Loneliness quotes can be found in a variety of media, from poetry to novels, cinema, and even theatre; great loneliness quotes are bountiful. If you’re feeling down and out, they can be a great way to put things in perspective.
We all feel lonely sometimes. To help remind you that you aren’t alone in reality, only in feeling, we’ve brought together some truly great loneliness quotes for you to sift through:
41 Loneliness Quotes:
1. F. Scott Fitzgerald
“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.”
2. Arthur C. Clarke
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
3. Douglas Coupland
“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.”
4. Maya Angelou
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
5. Haruki Murakami
“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?”
6. Lois Lowry
“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
7. Elizabeth Gilbert
“I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am h3er than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
8. Haruki Murakami
“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment. ”
9. Tahereh Mafi
“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
10. Honoré de Balzac
“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
11. John Steinbeck
“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
12. Jean-Paul Sartre
“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
13. Edgar Allan Poe
“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.”
14. John Steinbeck
“All great and precious things are lonely.”
15. Charles Bukowski
“Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
16. George Eliot
“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
17. Elizabeth Gilbert
“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
18. Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
19. Charlotte Brontë
“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.”
20. Janet Fitch
“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
21. Mother Teresa
“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.”
22. George R.R. Martin
“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.”
23. Sylvia Plath
“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship – but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
24. Jonathan Safran Foer
“I feel too much. That’s what’s going on.’ ‘Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?’ ‘My insides don’t match up with my outsides.’ ‘Do anyone’s insides and outsides match up?’ ‘I don’t know. I’m only me.’ ‘Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.’ ‘But it’s worse for me.’ ‘I wonder if everyone thinks it’s worse for him.’ ‘Probably. But it really is worse for me.”
25. Gabriel García Márquez
“Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.”
26. Joseph Conrad
“We live as we dream–alone …”
27. Simone de Beauvoir
“I am awfully greedy [and] I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish … You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
28. Fiona Apple
“When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you’re by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone.”
29. F. Scott Fitzgerald
“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.”
30. Lois Lowry
“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
31. Albert Schweitzer
“We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.”
32. Norman Cousins
“The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.”
33. Majorie Holmes
“We are so dumb and lonely and anxious and inept when we try to communicate.”
34. Pauline Phillips
“Loneliness is the ultimate poverty.”
35. Germaine Greer
“Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.”
36. Gretchen Rubin
“Keep in mind that to avoid loneliness, many people need both a social circle and an intimate attachment. Having just one of two may still leave you feeling lonely.”
37. Charlotte Brontë
“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.”
38. Alexander Theroux
“There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.”
39. Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
40. Augusten Burroughs
“I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”
41. Janet Fitch
“Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best you can do is know yourself; know what you want.”
Find Comfort in these Loneliness Quotes
When loneliness strikes, it can often be overwhelming. If these loneliness quotes attest to anything, it is that although it may feel that way, we really aren’t alone. Everyone feels lonely from time to time. Sometimes, all you need to cheer you up is to read a few loneliness quotes in order to bring you some perspective.
