81 Quotes About Loneliness

Feeling lonely is a universal experience that touches everyone at different points in life. While it can often feel isolating, it's important to recognize that loneliness is a natural part of the human condition. Whether you're seeking solace, understanding, or a simple reminder that you're not alone, diving into the wisdom and reflections of others can provide comfort. In this collection, we've curated 81 quotes about loneliness that capture the essence of this complex emotion. These quotes, from various authors, poets, and thinkers, offer a range of perspectives that allow you to explore and connect with the myriad feelings associated with solitude and isolation.

1. “They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars—on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.” - Robert Frost

2. “There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.” - G.K. Chesterton

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

4. “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?” - Haruki Murakami

5. “It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.” - Anne Rice

6. “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.” - David Foster Wallace

7. “Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.” - Marilynne Robinson

8. “Two turtle doves will show theeWhere my cold ashes lieAnd sadly murmuring tell theeHow in tears I did die” - Nikolai Gogol

9. “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.” - Paul Tillich

10. “All great and precious things are lonely.” - John Steinbeck

11. “Be good and you will be lonesome.” - Mark Twain

12. “Words are loneliness.” - Henry Miller

13. “Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.” - Henry Rollins

14. “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

15. “Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry...I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you.” - Charles M. Schulz

16. “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

17. “The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.” - Hubert Van Zeller

18. “Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.” - A.E. Coppard

19. “...sometimes I get tired. Sometimes I get bored. And sometimes all I want, more than anything else in the world, is to go on a freaking date.” - Kiersten White

20. “How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.” - Margaret Atwood

21. “Pale winter sun Is beatin' the ground Why'm I throwin' away The best thing that I've found My young heart's in tatters and I'm sureThat it will be a long time healing It's so hard to see what I'm doing this forWhen loneliness is all that I'm feeling” - David Gray

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

23. “You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.” - Jim Shepard

24. “I’m good when I’m alone. I’m comfortable when I’m alone. I can sit and do lots of things all by myself. Sex included.” - Johnny Weir

25. “It's only natural to feel lonely after the enjoyable moments pass. But as you experience new joys those feelings of sorrow will start to fade.” - Mizu Sahara

26. “My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.” - Khalil Gibran

27. “One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!” - Anne Rice

28. “I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.” - Sandy Welch

29. “The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.” - Mary Balogh

30. “The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.” - Stefan Zweig

31. “Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and waiting as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood—an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts—and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon.” - Tao Lin

32. “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.” - Fiona Apple

33. “He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.” - Nicole Krauss

34. “She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.” - Toni Morrison

35. “Thirsty for attention is a cry of loneliness.” - Toba Beta

36. “Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.” - Natalie Goldberg

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

38. “For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.” - Isabelle Eberhardt

39. “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” - Edith Wharton

40. “She was stronger alone…” - Jane Austen

41. “I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.” - Ford Madox Ford

42. “It's just as easy to be lonely in a city as out in the wilderness. Easier, really. It's harder to get to know someone when you meet in a crowded place. People can freely ignore you in the city; they can assume they don't have any responsibility for you. When there are fewer people, (...) they begin assuming some kind of responsibility, simply because you naturally do the same.” - Mercedes Lackey

43. “The problem with living so long is that we get used to it. We watch the mortals age and wither and die around us, watch the world change and decay...but no matter the hardship or the pain or the sorrow we suffer, we choose to continue living. Out of sheer habit, I think.” - Derek Landy

44. “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

45. “If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.” - Criss Jami

46. “He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.” - Virginia Woolf

47. “I shuffle along, letting the current pull me, and i have the sense that I am like a rat caught in a maze of tunnels, moving endlessly toward some promise of...of what? Light? Life? Cheese?” - Lisa Ann Sandell

48. “It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” - D.W. Winnicott

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

50. “I learned the strange art of loneliness, the weathered yearning that swells and passes, and swells and passes, when you walk a trail alone.” - Anna Carey

51. “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

52. “I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.” - Haruki Murakami

53. “Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.” - David Foster Wallace

54. “[A]s though mindful of the wife of Lot, who looked back from behind him, thou deliveredst me first to the sacred garments and monastic profession before thou gavest thyself to God. And for that in this one thing thou shouldst have had little trust in me I vehemently grieved and was ashamed. For I (God [knows]) would without hesitation precede or follow thee to the Vulcanian fires according to thy word. For not with me was my heart, but with thee. But now, more than ever, if it be not with thee, it is nowhere. For without thee it cannot anywhere exist.” - Héloïse

55. “And the strange thing was he had never loved her more than in that moment, because at that moment she had become himself.But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, not what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you. [...]And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognises in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can expose his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb.And the only way he had ever found, the only code, the only language by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle. If you had a bugle here, he told himself, you could speak to her and be understood, you could play Fatigue Call for her, with its tiredness, its heavy belly going out to sweep somebody else's streets when it would rather stay home and sleep, she would understand it then.But you havent got a bugle, himself said, not here nor any other place. Your tongue has been ripped out. All you got is two bottles, one nearly full, one nearly empty.” - James Jones

56. “But most days,I wander around feeling invisible.Like I'm a speck of dustfloating in the airthat can only be seenwhen a shaft of light hits it.” - Sonya Sones

57. “I am taking this in, slowly,Taking it into my body.This grief. How slowThe body is to realizeYou are never coming back.” - Donna Masini Slowly

58. “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

59. “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

60. “Karou wished she could be the kind of girl who was complete unto herself, comfortable in solitude, serene. But she wasn't. She was lonely, and she feared the missingness within her as if it might expand and... cancel her. She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust.” - Laini Taylor

61. “Ici, je me cache quand je veux. Je puis me cacher des jours et des jours, sans qu’on sache si j’existe ou non, et, sans que je le sache bien moi-même. Je m’enferme là-haut. Je lis, je dors, je rêve. Je ne bouge plus.” - Anne Hébert

62. “Sometimes the silence is the loudest thing in the room.” - Cory Basil

63. “As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.” - Don DeLillo

64. “I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.” - John Banville

65. “I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,if there were not a friend?The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

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

67. “I don't know why I still feel this pit in my stomach whenever I get a moment to think. I know what the pit is, too; I feel lonely. But I'm not alone, I keep telling myself.” - Pittacus Lore

68. “Outside the hospital, I squinted in the harsh morning sunlight. I could hear birds chirping in the tree, but even though I searched for them, they remained hidden from me.” - Nicholas Sparks

69. “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

70. “If I could always read I should never feel the want of company.” - George Gordon Byron

71. “I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine. The voice is his voice, and the voice is also my voice. And there are other voices, voices I have never heard before, voices that seem to be either dead or dying in a great moonlit darkness. More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement -- anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.” - Thomas Ligotti

72. “It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default—like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up.” - Laini Taylor

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.” - Ian Fleming

77. “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

78. “Silence is the source of healing. When we bring things from within ourselves out into the light of awareness, a healing process happens. In the silence, we can let go of all anger, sadness, fear, loneliness and frustration.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

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

80. “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

81. “...and the smoke that creeps off the tip of my cigarette and into the dim, scattered strands of light leaking off the moon, in through the clefts in the curtains, is much like my spirit trying to escape the burn of yesterday's presence.” - Kellie Elmore