Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • He did not seek company, but, if you offered it, he amiably accepted.

    —William Weaver, introduction to Boredom by Alberto Moravia

  • Our passions grow fiercer when left idle through lack of contact with other people.

    —St. John Cassian

  • There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely.

    ― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

  • One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world. Individual loneliness is a personal drama; one can feel lonely even in the midst of great natural beauty. An outcast in the world, indifferent to its being dazzling or dismal, self-consumed with triumphs and failures, engrossed in inner drama—such is the fate of the solitary. The feeling of cosmic loneliness, on the other hand, stems not so much from man’s subjective agony as from an awareness of the world’s isolation, of objective nothingness. It is as if all the splendors of this world were to vanish at once, leaving behind the dull monotony of a cemetery. Many are haunted by the vision of an abandoned world encased in glacial solitude, untouched by even the pale reflections of a crepuscular light. Who is more unhappy? He who feels his own loneliness or he who feels the loneliness of the world? Impossible to tell, and besides, why should I bother with a classification of loneliness? Is it not enough that one is alone?

    ― Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

  • And it’s lonely / And one day it won’t be lonely / It will just be solitude / And one day this solitude will swallow me whole

    Wasted ABQ Summer
    Bimbo Ubermensch

  • It’s hard, certainly — it’s painful and exhausting and fundamentally terrifying to rip yourself open and leave the guts at the mercy of the people you choose to love. But if I know anything, I know this: It’s better than being alone. 

    no good alone, rayne fisher-quann

  • Where could you find offenses in solitude in order to practice these virtues? In solitude, there is no one with whom to talk, and so you live in involuntary silence, but in the community, there are the guarding of the senses and the guarding of the tongue. Guarding the senses is a virtue found in the community because in the desert there is nothing for the senses to gather. Likewise with guarding the tongue, you must gain the virtue of silence in the community before you venture out to solitude.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us

  • During your time in the community, you are testing yourself to see if you can bear with people. Do you lose your peace? Do you hate people? Or do you try to avenge oneself? If you try to isolate yourself in order not to engage in these troubles, you are likened to a person who refuses to take an exam for fear of failing. The result is that you will not graduate. The correct action is for a person to take the exam and pass. It is easy to sit alone and not make mistakes. Neither will the devil leave you; he will give you even more thoughts than people would, to the point that you will leave your cell saying, “It is better to deal with people than to deal with this mental warfare.” Take the test and succeed.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us

  • Community interactions provide an opportunity for you to try yourself, overcome your weaknesses, and gain virtues. One time, a monk went to the abbot of the monastery asking to be released to go to another monastery. The abbot asked if anyone troubled him, to which he responded, “No, but I need to go attain virtues. Here, no one wrongs me, that I may forgive him; no one offends me, that I may pardon him; no one persecutes me, that I may endure him. So, where will I attain these virtues? I need to go to a place where I can attain virtues.” If you remain steadfast, and the community troubles come to you, then say, “Yes, this is where I will attain virtues.” If someone upsets you, say, “Yes, God sent you to me so that I can attain the virtue of endurance.”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us

  • Worship must come from a pure heart. Likewise, if purity of heart does not precede the life of solitude, it turns from solitude into introversion, from a means of worship to the goal of fleeing from people, or intolerance of people, or as one of the fathers put it, “Such a person spends a hundred years in his cell, and does not even learn how one should sit.” Therefore, we need to place purity of heart as the primary goal before us. Purity of heart requires you to search yourself, know your mistakes, and work on them.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us