60 Quotes About Loneliness

Loneliness is a universal experience, touching every corner of our lives at one point or another. Whether it stems from a moment of introspection, the absence of loved ones, or the simple yet profound quiet of solitude, it’s a feeling that resonates deeply within the human soul. In this collection, we've gathered the top 60 quotes that eloquently capture the many facets of loneliness. These words from poets, philosophers, and artists offer comfort, understanding, and a sense of shared experience, reminding us that while loneliness might feel isolating, we are, paradoxically, never truly alone in it. Dive in and explore these powerful reflections on an emotion that connects us all.

1. “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” - May Sarton

2. “Then stirs the feeling infinite, so feltIn solitude, where we are least alone.” - George Gordon Byron

3. “And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.” - C.S. Lewis

4. “An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.” - David Foster Wallace

5. “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.” - Tennessee Williams

6. “Sometimes being surronded by everyone is the loneliest, because you'll realise you have no one to turn to.” - Soraya

7. “Words are loneliness.” - Henry Miller

8. “And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart. (p. 37)” - Hilary Thayer Hamann

9. “Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.” - Sidney Sheldon

10. “Хүмүүс бий болсон үеэсээ эхлэн үүрд ганцаардан хоригдсон хоригдол болсон зүрх сэтгэл цохилон байдаг бүрхэвчийг нэвтлэн урахыг хий дэмий цөхрөлтгүй оролдон, гар хөл, уруул ам, харц, тачаадан дагжсан нүцгэн биеэрээ, янаглалд сульдсан хайр сэтгэлээрээ дараа нь бас л хаягдан ганцаардах өөр нэгэнд амьдралыг өгөх гэж хий дэмий хүч тавьдaг.” - Guy de Maupassant

11. “I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.” - Søren Kierkegaard

12. “I think that if we look for love courageously, it reveals itself, and we wind up attracting even more love. If one person really wants us, everyone does. But if we’re alone, we become even more alone. Life is strange.” - Paulo Coelho

13. “What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.” - T.S. Eliot

14. “I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!” - Charles Bukowski

15. “I ain't got no people. I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain't no good. They don't have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin' to fight all the time. . . 'Course Lennie's a God damn nuisance most of the time, but you get used to goin' around with a guy an' you can't get rid of him.” - John Steinbeck

16. “being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.” - Charles Bukowski

17. “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.” - Augusten Burroughs

18. “I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.” - Suzanne Collins

19. “A terrible feeling of loneliness besieged her, so strong it was almost like physical pain...” - Jennifer Wilde

20. “The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy” - Richard Bach

21. “It's sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you're sleeping together, you're all alone.” - J.L. Merrow

22. “Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.” - Haruki Murakami

23. “When I'm in turmoil, when I can't think, when I'm exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It's just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.” - Jim Butcher

24. “A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.” - Pauline Kael

25. “Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?” - David Markson

26. “It all comes down to this: when you recognise your loneliness in another person, when you see desperation so familiar to yours written across someone else, you can’t just let them leave.” - Chloe Rattray

27. “No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord one that will do To swell a progress start a scene or two Advise the prince no doubt an easy tool Deferential glad to be of use Politic cautious and meticulous Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse At times indeed almost ridiculous— Almost at times the Fool. I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us and we drown.” - T. S. Eliot

28. “Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and sould for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me. Yes, I always thought there would be more time left for me, more time left for us, and for the child we might one day have, but I never felt that my work could be put aside as they could, my husband and the idea of our child, a little boy or girl that I sometimes even tried to imagine, but always only vaguely enough that he or she remained a ghostly emissary of our future, just her back while she sat playing with her blocks on the floor, or just his feet sticking out of the blanket on our bed, a tiny pair of feet. What of it, there would be time for them, for the life they stood for, the one I was not yet prepared to live because I had not yet done what I had meant to do in this one.” - Nicole Krauss

29. “On the plane leaving Tokyo I’m sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing “Over the Rainbow” straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn’t give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don’t even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon.” - Bret Easton Ellis

30. “Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.” - Margaret Atwood

31. “Being alone is best. I mean, it's true, isn't it? In the end you'll be absolutely alone; therefore, being alone is natural. If you accept that, nothing bad can happen. That's why I shut myself away in my six-mat one-room apartment.” - Tatsuhiko Takimoto

32. “Don't you understand? Listen carefully to what I'm saying. If you do, you'll get it. you can grasp this easily. In short...in short, I shut myself in because I'm lonely. Because I don't want to face any more loneliness, I shut myself away.” - Tatsuhiko Takimoto

33. “Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.” - Mark Helprin

34. “Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.” - Anne Frank

35. “I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.” - Sylvia Plath

36. “Suddenly this defeat.This rain.The blues gone grayAnd the browns gone grayAnd yellowA terrible amber.In the cold streetsYour warm body.In whatever roomYour warm body.Among all the peopleYour absenceThe people who are alwaysNot you.I have been easy with treesToo long.Too familiar with mountains.Joy has been a habit.NowSuddenlyThis rain.” - Jack Gilbert

37. “I have a mouth for kisses / No one to give or to take / I have a heart in my bosom / Beating for nobody's sake.” - Lana Citron

38. “Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.” - David Nicholls

39. “If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.” - Criss Jami

40. “My sleep wasn't peaceful, though. I have the sense of emerging from a world of dark, haunted places where I traveled alone.” - Suzanne Collins

41. “We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.” - Ford Madox Ford

42. “Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

43. “For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.” - Elizabeth von Arnim

44. “I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.” - Rachel Hartman

45. “Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.And the magical things you can do with that ballwill make you the winning-est winner of all.Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be,with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.Except when they don'tBecause, sometimes they won't.I'm afraid that some timesyou'll play lonely games too.Games you can't win'cause you'll play against you.” - Dr. Seuss

46. “Loneliness is not a result of physical isolation; you're only lonely the day you realize that nobody shares your opinions.” - Sabah Carrim

47. “Noć je bila od onih u kojima se usamljenost čini kao nesvladiva daljina.” - Jasna Horvat

48. “I am a lonely man,' Sensei said. 'And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often.” - Natsume Soseki

49. “Önce kelime vardı” diye başlıyor Yohanna’ya göre İncil.Kelimelerden önce de Yalnızlık vardı ve kelimeden sonra da var olmaya devam etti yalnızlık.. Kelimenin bittiği yerden başladı. Kelimeler yalnızlığı unutturdu ve yalnızlık kelimeyle birlikte yaşadı insanın içinde.Kelimeler,yalnızlılığı anlattı ve yalnızlığın içinde eriyip kayboldu.Yalnız kelimeler acıyı dindirdi ve kelimeler insanın aklına geldikçe yalnızlık büyüdü,dayanılmaz oldu.” - Oğuz Atay

50. “...he went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.” - Jo Nesbø

51. “Loneliness can make you feel that you have a kingdom in darkness.” - MRK ONTIM

52. “I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.” - Jack Kerouac

53. “Real relief from loneliness requires the cooperation of at least one other person, and yet the more chronic our loneliness becomes, the less equipped we may be to entice such cooperation.” - John T. Cacioppo

54. “True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.” - Emil Cioran

55. “......and not out of fear or loneliness, but only to find myself again... for we have come too far my Life, to turn back now...” - John Geddes

56. “Sometimes we don't need to eat or drink as much as we do, but it has become a kind of addiction. We feel so lonely. Loneliness is one of the afflictions of modern life. It is similar to the Third and Fourth Precpets--we feel lonely, so we engage in conversation, or even in a sexual relationship, hoping that the feeling of loneliness will go away. Drinking and eating can also be the result of loneliness. You want to drink or overeat in order to forget your loneliness, but what you eat may bring toxins into your body. When you are lonely, you open the refrigerator, watch TV, read magazines or novels, or pick up the telephone to talk. But unmindful consumption always makes things worse (68).” - Thich Nhat Hanh

57. “I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little bit of a loner. It’s been a big part of my maturing process to learn to allow people to support me. I tend to be very self-reliant and private. And I have this history of wanting to work things out on my own and protect people from what’s going on with me.” - Kerry Washington

58. “She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.” - Kristin Cashore

59. “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

60. “They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.” - David Levithan