Loneliness is such a complex emotion.
These quotes about loneliness run the full spectrum from melancholy sadness to quiet self-discovery. Everyone gets lonely. Thankfully, a lot of great writers, thinkers, and philosophers have left us with beautiful nuggets describing their experience of feeling alone.
Here we’ve collected the 85 best loneliness quotes of all time, complete with a few beautiful images for your Facebook sharing needs. Enjoy!
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.Tennessee Williams
Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.Henry Rollins
And if I’m alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company.Paul Coelho
I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.Henry David Thoreau
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.Anais Nin
Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.Paul Tillich
If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.Jean-Paul Sartre
Loneliness doesn’t have much to do with where you are.Hugh Hefner
I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.Warsan Shire
Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.Martha Beck
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.Tennessee Williams
They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.Sir Philip Sidney
I was never less alone than when by myself.Edward Gibbon
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
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.Mark Twain
A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man –the one he used to be.Cesare Pavese
Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.Paul Tillich
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.Douglas Coupland
Be good and you will be lonesome.Mark Twain
We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.Orson Welles
It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.D.H. Lawrence
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.Henrik Ibsen
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.Jodi Picoult
The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.Friedrich Nietzsche
At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.Brendan Francis
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.Lorraine Hansberry
Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.Lillian Hellman
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
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 f#$&-job, rub my b&$#s, 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 Bukowsi
Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.Poppy Z. Brite
Loneliness is something you can’t walk away from.William Feather
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.Thomas Wolfe
If you are afraid of being lonely, don’t try to be right.Jules Renard
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.Thomas Wolfe
It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.Rilke
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.Kurt Vonnegut
“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
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 Barton
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.Elizabeth Gilbert
An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.Henry Miller
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.Octavio Paz
People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.Joseph Fort Newton
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.Maya Angelou
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
Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.Dag Hammarskjold
My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.Warsan Shire
There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.Charles Bukowski
No one ever discovers the depth of his own loneliness.Georges Bernanos
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.Haruki Murakami
People drain me, even the closest of friends, and I find loneliness to be the best state in the union to live in.Margaret Cho
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.Mother Teresa
Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.Dag Hammarskjold
People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.Anton Checkov
Strife is better than loneliness.Irish Saying
I celebrate myself, and sing myself.Walt Whitman
To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.Suzanne Gordon
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
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.Graham Greene
If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.Anton Chekhov
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?T.S. Eliot
Loneliness breaks the spirit.Jewish Proverb
Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s so lonely when you don’t even know yourself.Unknown
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it sure makes the rest of you lonely.Charles M. Shulz
Loneliness is the universal problem of rich people.Joan Collins
One plus love equals lonely.Jarod Kintz
Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.Paul Tournier
If I’m such a legend, why am I so lonely?Judy Garland
It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.Alber Einstein
There are people who like to be alone without feeling lonely at all.Toba Beta
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”John Steinbeck
To be an adult is to be alone.Jean Rostand
We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.Albert Schweitzer
Tore up my heart and shut it down. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. A simple little kind of free. Nothing to do, no one but me, and that’s all I need. I’m perfectly lonely.John Mayer
Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.Maya Angelou
Don’t try to hog loneliness and keep it all to yourself. Share it with a special someone. Jarod Kintz
No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There’s nothing wrong with being alone.Wendy Wasserstein
In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely.Geoffrey F. Fisher
Everyone’s alone — or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; They make faces, and think they understand each other. And I’m sure they don’t. Is that a delusion?T.S. Eliot
Loneliness is the unloneliest feeling in the world, as everyone has experienced it.Jarod Kintz
Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.Douglas Coupland