Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • “We seek more and more independence, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it.”

    —Slater, P. (1970). The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. Boston: Beacon Press.

    Encountering Loneliness: Which Condition Applies to You?

  • Enter into your entertainments only as you are asked to do so. Be friendly, but do not seek out invitations.  Those who watch you, at least the reasonable ones, will be happy to see you sociable enough to join them, but be careful enough to not always be found entertaining yourself.  When you do appear at these entertainments, do so in a godly manner.  The world is critical of people who condemn its ways while living by its rules.

    —François Fénelon, The Seeking Heart

  • Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

    Between Solitude and Loneliness
    Donald Hall

  • Try to be more attentive to yourself instead of judging the actions, behavior, and attitude of others towards you; if you do not see love in them, it is because you yourself have no love within you.”

     —Elder Leo of Optina

  • Loneliness is felt only by the person who doesn’t love, and this loneliness becomes greater when they want/expect others to love them.

    —Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra

  • And in your heart you will now be free at last and utterly alone. It is only in this aloneness, this utter solitude, that dependence and desire will die, and the capacity to love is born. For one no longer sees others as means to satisfy one’s addiction.

    ―Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love

  • We all enter the Infinite Scroll shouting, hoping to find love.

    Bimbo Ubermensch
    The Ocean

  • If I have the feeling that I am applying boundaries in an improper way, I ought to open the doors once again, because boundaries preserve relationships, and not destroy them.

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Build Boundaries

    Seldom set foot in your neighbor’s house,

    Lest he become weary of you and hate you.

    Proverbs 25:17 (NKJV)

  • The person who lives in isolation from others and refrains from helping others, has a problem with boundaries, because he shuts his doors to good things.


    Nevertheless, we pray in the Divine Liturgy, “He made us unto Himself an assembled people, and sanctified us.”

    …

    The avoiders do not allow [both] the good and the bad from entering, even though there may be a risk that God may be left outside the heart, and he does not allow Him to come in: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.” (Rev 3:20)

    “Do not consent in your thoughts, nor characterize in your words, any person as evil. The Lord has loosened us from the bondage of the devil, so that we should not bind ourselves again nor give our souls up to slavery by our ill opinion.”

    St. Macarius

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Build Boundaries

  • “If he’d learned one thing while he’d been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.”

    — Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming

    Pain, for instance. Everyone has it, most people want to talk about it, yet no one really wants to hear about it. Talking about one’s pain makes one boring and embarrassing. It imposes on the sympathy and energy of others.

    —Noreen Masud, There is nothing so deep as the gleaming surface of the aphorism