People think they know me, but they don’t. Not really. Actually, I am one of the loneliest people on this earth. I cry sometimes, because it hurts. It does. To be honest, I guess you could say that it hurts to be me.
—Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American Singer-Songwriter
I’m afraid sometimes you’ll play lonely games too, games you can’t win because you’ll play against you.
—Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr. Seuss’) (1904–91) American Children’s Books Writer, Writer, Cartoonist, Animator
If you are afraid of being lonely, don’t try to be right.
—Jules Renard (1864–1910) French Writer, Diarist
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
—Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American Poet
I was never less alone than when by myself.
—Edward Gibbon (1737–94) English Historian, Politician
It would do the world good if every man in it would compel himself occasionally to be absolutely alone. Most of the world’s progress has come out of such loneliness.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton (1886–1967) American Author, Advertising Executive, Politician
Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
—Lillian Hellman (1905–84) American Dramatist, Memoirist
Loneliness breaks the spirit.
—Yiddish Proverb
The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.
—Eric Hoffer (1902–83) American Philosopher, Author
Of my friends I am the only one left.
—Terence (c.195–159 BCE) Roman Comic Dramatist
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.
—Alice Walker (b.1944) American Novelist, Activist
When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone.
—Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish Novelist, Poet, Playwright, Lawyer
It’s a terrible thing to be alone—yes it is—it is—but don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath—as terrible as you like—but a mask.
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand-born British Author
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
—Carson McCullers (1917–67) American Novelist
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
—Eric Hoffer (1902–83) American Philosopher, Author
If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) French Philosopher, Playwright, Novelist, Screenwriter, Political Activist
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.
—Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) American Playwright
A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
—John Cheever (1912–82) American Novelist, Short-story Writer
Loneliness is the ultimate poverty
—Pauline Phillips (Abigail van Buren) (b.1918) American Columnist
Skillful listening is the best remedy for loneliness, loquaciousness, and laryngitis.
—William Arthur Ward (1921–94) American Author
I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease… observing a spear of summer grass.
—Walt Whitman (1819–92) American Poet, Essayist, Journalist, American, Poet, Essayist, Journalist
We’re all in this alone.
—Lily Tomlin (b.1939) American Comedy Actress
We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
—Tennessee Williams (1911–83) American Playwright
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) Irish Novelist, Short-story Writer
Be good and you will be lonely.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?
—David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American Novelist, Essayist
When Christ said: “I was hungry and you fed me,” he didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that’s real hunger.
—Mother Teresa (1910–97) Roman Catholic Missionary, Nun
Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher