65 Powerful Loneliness Quotes

Loneliness is a profound and universal emotion that touches the lives of many. Whether it’s the result of a significant life change, a moment of introspection, or an unfulfilled connection, we’ve all experienced the isolating feeling of being alone. In such times, words have the power to offer solace, understanding, and a sense of connection. This carefully curated collection of 65 powerful loneliness quotes provides a resonant echo to the silent moments we all encounter. Let these words from poets, philosophers, and thinkers serve as a reminder that, even in our loneliest hours, we are never truly alone in our experiences.

1. “If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.” - Jules Renard

2. “We live as we dream--alone....” - Joseph Conrad

3. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.” - T.S. Eliot

4. “Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” - W.S. Merwin

5. “We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different” - Nancy E. Turner

6. “At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.” - Rainer Marie Rilke

7. “If you smile when you are alone, then you really mean it.” - Andy Rooney

8. “In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment? ” - Miranda July

9. “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 stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

10. “My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.” - Anthony Swofford

11. “Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.” - Vladimir Nabokov

12. “Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

13. “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

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

15. “Loneliness Ends With Love” - Al Lerner

16. “Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.” - Stephen King

17. “Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.” - Dag Hammarskjöld

18. “Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

19. “Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.” - Marilynne Robinson

20. “You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.” - Darren Shan

21. “Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.” - Stephen King

22. “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.” - Sylvia Plath

23. “When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.” - Banana Yoshimoto

24. “The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.” - Deb Caletti

25. “Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.” - Paul Auster

26. “Talking to strangers sounded like talking to no one, which Henry had some firsthand experience in- in real life. It was lonely. Almost as lonely as Lake View Cemetery, where he'd buried Ethel.” - Jamie Ford

27. “One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-coloured foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness like a great star of snow. It was the single living being that somewhat enlivened the lonely landscape.” - Théophile Gautier

28. “People claim that love is the deepest feeling, but don't you believe it. Loneliness is the most affecting of human emotions. Nothing makes life more vivid. If you wish to live in the moment, I recommend intense loneliness.” - Seth

29. “She thought it must be a lonely life for a boy who hated books.” - Hilda Van Stockum

30. “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

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

32. “I wanted to tell him then how loneliness can become a tangible thing, after a while. It’s something that you carry with you on your shoulder, hold up like a friend with a twisted ankle. It sits with you and walks the streets with you. It’s a selfish thing and it refuses to let go or even split its attention. Of course, like a particularly annoying itch, you can convince yourself for a while that it’s not there. You can go to libraries and sit with friends and drink more coffee than your body can handle and you can feel surrounded and happy. But eventually you have to scratch it. Loneliness steals you away from the world, as if you’ve been cut loose and you’re lost, untethered, somewhere far above everyone else. Just you and this feeling that you just need someone to put a hand on your shoulder and turn you around, to look at you and tell you the three words that matter most: You’re not alone. Don’t be scared. I am here. It’s not about love or lust or any other inadequate word; it’s about being touched and realising that you are no longer by yourself.” - Chloe Rattray

33. “If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts [...] That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on [...] That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused [...] That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer [...] That loneliness is not a function of solitude [...] That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt [...] That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness [...] That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating [...] That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused [...]That it is permissible to want [...]That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.” - David Foster Wallace

34. “All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.” - Sarah Dessen

35. “I didn't let her go. She went. It's not my fault.She did it.She could undo it. This is feeling so fucking famliar.Why do we even bother? Why do we make ourselves so open to such easy damage? Is it all loneliness? Is it all fear? Of is it just to experience those narcotic moments of belonging with someone else?” - David Levithan

36. “Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone.""Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone."He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.” - Theodore Sturgeon

37. “I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to do – I couldn’t keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn’t work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write well, you argue clearly, but you don’t have anything to say.” - Haruki Murakami

38. “To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which -- or, rather, all the more because -- here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here. Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself.” - Haruki Murakami

42. “People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world’s worst kind of pain.” - Gaara

43. “Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me, on one side, and everything else, on the other. This for each of us exhaustively defines the whole universe... And then they hold by a prescriptive axiom the undoubtedly equally true and inarguable fact that we each ought to desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with Self, on one hand, and vastly empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other. A non-full universe... The emptier one’s universe is, the worse it is... Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other... We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self. Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem... Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering... There is always more than one solution... An autonomously full universe... Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self... Yes. I plan to grow to infinite size... There will of course eventually cease to be room for anyone else in the universe at all.” - David Foster Wallace

44. “He had been for many years, a quiet silent man, associating but little with other men, and used to companionship with his own thoughts. He had never known before the strength of the want in his heart for the frequent recognition of a nod, a look, a word; or the immense amount of relief that had been poured into it by drops through such small means.” - Charles Dickens

45. “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

46. “It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.” - Ryu Murakami

47. “Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean, really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others—other things and other people. I work as hard as I can to list their names in my head. On that list, of course, is you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. And the alley, and the well, and the persimmon tree, and that kind of thing. And the wigs that I’ve made here with my own hands. And the little bits and pieces I remember about the boy. All these little things (though you’re not just another one of those little things, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but anyhow…) help me to come back “here” little by little.” - Haruki Murakami

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

49. “I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.” - John Fowles

50. “I now understood that real secrets were lonely. They planted themselves inside of you and expanded, until you felt like that was all you were-a lonely little secret, isolated in your experiences.” - Yvonne Woon

51. “Brianna peered through the large window into the sea of plexiglass cradles. Each infant, so small and precious, belonged to someone. Someone who cared for them. Someone who loved them. Brianna sniffled and turned away, unable to bear the thought that she had no one.” - J.E.B. Spredemann

52. “On I’ll pass,dragging my huge love behind me.On whatfeverish night, deliria-ridden,by what Goliaths was I begot – I, so bigand by no one needed?” - Vladimir Mayakovsky

53. “You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time.” - Nicole Krauss

54. “I've chosen a life that's so different from everybody else's that it cuts me off from them. Practically everybody I know treats me like a guest celebrity. Of course it's my own fault. I feel so damn alone sometimes, I feel like I could just float away into the stratosphere and everybody would stand there looking up at me and not one would haul me back down to earth. No ropes.” - Jordan Mechner

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

56. “There are extremes within any population, but on average, at least among young adults, those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected. They are no more or less physically attractive than average, and they do not differ, on average, from the non-lonely in terms of height, weight, age, education, or intelligence. Most important, when we look at the broad continuum (rather than just the extremes) of people who feel lonely, we find that they have the capacity to be just as socially adept as anyone else. Feeling lonely does not mean that we have deficient social skills.” - John T. Cacioppo

57. “The Sun is such a lonely star. Whenever he comes out to see his friends, they all disappear.” - Joseph Gordon-Levitt

58. “..snow gently settles like dust in a shaft - for one moment there is no one else - only the wind like the hiss of an ice skate ...” - John Geddes

59. “It felt as if I’d been teleported to the dark side of the moon, forced to gaze out at the stars and wonder which one I’d come from.” - Heather Heffner

60. “- en nu wist ze ook al evenveel van hem als hij van haar: dat hij voor de bioscoop een studio had gehad en daarvoor roadie was geweest. Behalve dan dat hij een Fender had viel er over hem verder niets te vertellen.” - Thomas Rosenboom

61. “أنا الغريب فى وحشة الأيام ..زادى الصير..وصاحبى الحزن..وحبيبتى الدموع_فاطمة زكى_” - بقلم فاطمة زكى

62. “To be a human being means to be lonely.To go on becoming a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness.” - Robert Hobson

63. “The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.” - Victor Hugo

64. “I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much.” - David Levithan

65. “I want to be known as the 23 year-old who is foolishly in love with a Prince she can't see. I want to rejoice while holding the rose of singleness, even when my hands bleed from its thorns. I want to resist the urge to envy the pairs growing in the middle of my neighbors' gardens. I want to be rooted in the simple truth that unripen pairs taste like lies and lingering loneliness. 
I want to put Jesus on my bullet wound and cling to His heart wrenching hope because He was kind enough to be a Band-Aid when He should have stayed a King.” - Katie Kiesler