68 Loneliness Quotes To Reflect

In the labyrinth of human emotions, loneliness often stands as a profound, yet universal experience. While it can be daunting, it also serves as a powerful lens through which we gain introspection and self-awareness. These 68 loneliness quotes have been carefully curated to help you reflect on this complex feeling, offering solace, understanding, and perhaps a new perspective. Whether you find comfort in the words of poets, philosophers, or contemporary thinkers, these quotes aim to remind you that in the isolation, you are never truly alone. Join us on this journey of contemplative exploration and discover the hidden wisdom that resides within the depths of loneliness.

1. “What have I become?My sweetest friend; everyone I know goes away in the end.And you could have it all:my empire of dirt.I will let you down.I will make you hurt.” - Nine Inch Nails

2. “In a world filled with people, some happy, others like me, I feel so all alone.” - Mary B. Morrison

3. “I can wade Grief—Whole Pools of it—I'm used to that—But the least push of JoyBreaks up my feet—And I tip—drunken—Let no Pebble—smile—'Twas the New Liquor—That was all!” - Emily Dickinson

4. “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

5. “The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” - Mother Teresa

6. “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

7. “Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.” - Jean Webster

8. “In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.” - Robert Hughes

9. “Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace” - Dean Koontz

10. “to the glory of His name let me witness that in far away lands, in loneliness (deepest sometimes when it seems least so), in times of downheartedness and tiredness and sadness, always always He is near. He does comfort, if we let Him. Perhaps someone as weak and good-for-nothing as even I am may read this. Don't be afraid! Through all circumstances, outside, inside, He can keep me close.” - Amy Carmichael

11. “I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, 'No, I won't do it, I won't behave his way anymore. I'm lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving,' and then you do it.” - Leo F. Buscaglia

12. “The personal desolation Christ is experiencing on the cross is what you and I should be experiencing--but instead, Jesus is bearing it, and bearing it all alone.Why alone?He's alone so that we might never be alone.” - C.J. Mahaney

13. “For my part, I think that the mystery is always greatest where there is the most - emptiness.” - Judith Krantz

14. “If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.” - Leonardo da Vinci

15. “Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.” - Anne Carson

16. “It is a very strange sensation to inexperience youth to feel itself quite alone the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed, and still I was alone.” - Charlotte Brontë

17. “Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

18. “It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!"I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then,if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down heretill I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burstof tears, 'I do wish they WOULD put their heads down! I am so VERY tiredof being all alone here!” - Lewis Carroll

19. “People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.” - Karl Lagerfeld

20. “Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objectsof affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing afaded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me nowto remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, halffancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it wasfolded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I wascomparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.” - Charlotte Brontë

21. “Song of a Second AprilAPRIL this year, not otherwiseThan April of a year agoIs full of whispers, full of sighs,Dazzling mud and dingy snow;Hepaticas that pleased you soAre here again, and butterflies.There rings a hammering all day,And shingles lie about the doors;From orchards near and far awayThe gray wood-pecker taps and bores,And men are merry at their chores,And children earnest at their play.The larger streams run still and deep;Noisy and swift the small brooks run.Among the mullein stalks the sheepGo up the hillside in the sunPensively; only you are gone,You that alone I cared to keep.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

22. “You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.” - Gilles Deleuze

23. “I'm not much but I'm all I have.” - Philip K. Dick

24. “I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren't in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their own.” - Rabih Alameddine

25. “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

26. “To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.” - Suzanne Gordon

27. “But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin.” - Zoe Heller

28. “It’s just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he’d forget my water or food and I’d cry and cry and cry.” She stops talking and looks out the window. “I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.” - Holly Black

29. “On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king.” - Jennifer Donnelly

30. “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

31. “For better or worse, she was the lady Soraya. And the lady Soraya would never dream of missing the warm bulk of Casia's body between her and the hearth, or the comforting drone of Ludo's snores. Or the wry laughter of a slave... a slave, for Azura's sake! The lady Soraya needed no one. The lady Soraya cried herself to sleep.” - Hilari Bell

32. “A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

33. “Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.” - Ingmar Bergman

34. “I HIDE myself within my flowerThat wearing on your breast,You, unsuspecting, wear me too—And angels know the rest.I hide myself within my flower,That, fading from your vase,You, unsuspecting, feel for meAlmost a loneliness...” - Emily Dickinson

35. “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

36. “I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

37. “That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.” - Marilynne Robinson

38. “She was like a lone angel floating above the surface of the earth, laughing with delight because she could fly but crying out of loneliness.” - Markus Zusak

39. “There's a book of poetryin the lines of my handsthat no one wants to read” - Holly Schindler

40. “It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?” - Jonathan Safran Foer

41. “There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again.” - Haruki Murakami

42. “I love when I reach Marcus on the phone and as he says hello, I can hear the music he's listening to in the background. That music is the sound of him without me. How he surrounds himself when I'm not there, which is almost all the time.” - Megan McCafferty

43. “Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.” - Henri J.M. Nouwen

44. “I felt very lonely when they were all there.” - Ernest Hemingway

45. “He’s like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen.” - Henry Miller

46. “I don't know," she said. "We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.” - Dorothy Parker

47. “I had ways of consoling myself. Yes, there was food but there was beyond food, this idea I had of an oversoul of loneliness. A connectedness among the world's lonely that I could turn to when I was very low. There was a delicious romance in being utterly alone, & I told myself I was nobler for it, & that there was a purpose to my solitude, O there must be.” - Liz Moore

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

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

50. “The loneliest days are the ones where you keep company with someone you love who can’t hear you.” - Holly Robinson

51. “Μόνος σου ζεις όταν ακουμπάς την πλαστική σακούλα του μανάβη πάνω στο τραπέζι και ακούς το τρίξιμο. Όταν κυκλοφοράς με μια βρώμικη μπλούζα και φυσάς την μύτη σου χωρίς χαρτομάντηλο. Όταν ρωτάς κι απαντάς στην ερώτηση τί ώρα είναι. ("Γιάντες")” - Αμάντα Μιχαλοπούλου

52. “Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.” - Tan Twan Eng

53. “For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.” - Michelle Latiolais

54. “At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.” - Saul Bellow

55. “You know that saying about how you don’t know what you have until it’s gone? I already did know what I had, and now that she’s gone, I know even more.” - A.S. King

56. “There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.” - Anne Rice

57. “I’m alone, stumbling through the city in the dark, trying not to let the night freeze my blood.” - Isaac Marion

58. “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

59. “......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

60. “This morning could have been perfect. The cruel truth is they have never been. Give us loneliness or give us death.” - Sean Gabler

61. “Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

62. “People accuse me of falling in love easily. It just means that I'm able to see the beauty in most of the people who cross paths with me and I appreciate it for what it is and also for what it isn't. Love is imperfect. Falling for someone's flaws is just as necessary as falling for their strengths. And people like myself, who fall into love easily, are sometimes the loneliest souls around at the end of the day.” - Ashly Lorenzana

63. “I'm thinking that it will be autumn soon," she said, lifting her gaze to his. "Autumn is my absolute favorite season. Spring is overrated. It's soggy and the trees are still bare from winter. Winter drags on and on, and summer is nice, but it's all the same. Autumn is different. I mean, is there any perfume in the world that can compare with the smell of burning leaves?" she asked with an engaging smile. Matt thought she smelled a hell of a lot better than burning leaves, but he let her continue. "Autumn —is thexincgitsinagrechanging. It's like dusk." "Dusk?""Dusk is my favorite time of day, for the same reason. When I was young, I used to walk down our driveway at dusk in the summer and stand at the fence, watching all the cars going by with their headlights on. Everyone had a place to go, something to do. The night was just beginning ..." She trailed off in embarrassment. "That must sound incredibly silly.""It sounds incredibly lonely.” - Judith McNaught

64. “To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.” - Peter Heller

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

66. “It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction.” - David Amerland

67. “Vienatvė ieško kelionės draugo, neklausdama, kas jis. Kas to nesupranta, tas niekada nebuvo vienišas, o tik vienas.” - Erich Maria Remarque

68. “Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. People talk to her, but it feels like they are outside a house, talking through the walls. There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.” - David Levithan