Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • Loneliness is complex, she notes. “It can impact those who crave time to themselves after a week at work”; a double bind in which company is both a salve and an impediment.

    The agony of weekend loneliness: ‘I won’t speak to another human until Monday’

  • Solitude will cure our distaste for a crowd, and a crowd will cure our boredom with solitude.

    The mind should not be kept continuously at the same pitch of concentration, but given amusing diversions.

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

  • The epidemic of loneliness and depression results from proud minds lacking in humility, from failed interpersonal relationships, from unsatisfied egotistical aspirations, from self-aggrandizement, praise-seeking, and self-love. This loneliness is strong enough to weaken a person and to make him sick. But love is stronger, capable of healing and regenerating the whole world.

    Humility — An Antidote to Loneliness

  • Why are we lonely? Because everyone is choosing him or herself over everyone else.

    Because we are greedy, other people are poor. Because we are arrogant, someone else is put down. Because we exalt ourselves, someone else is abased. Because we desire fame, someone else is forgotten. Because we see only ourselves, we are lonely.

    Those Lonely Moments In The Night

  • Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence of paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.

    —Olivia Laing,The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

  • We go through life running away from our own loneliness, we put a cellophane covering over our own depth and riches and live instead at the surface of our minds, hearts, and personalities. We are too frightened of it to enter into it. The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves.

    — Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

  • Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

    —Rainer Maria Rilke,Letters to a Young Poet

  • Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.

    —Douglas Coupland

  • All these afflictions are worse when, through hatred of their toilsome failure, men have retreated into idleness and private studies which are unbearable to a mind aspiring to public service, keen on activity, and restless by nature because of course it is short of inner resources. In consequence, when the pleasures have been removed which busy people derive from their actual activities, the mind cannot endure the house, the solitude, the walls, and hates to observe its own isolation. From this arises that boredom and self-dissatisfaction, that turmoil of a restless mind and gloomy and grudging endurance of our leisure, especially when we are ashamed to admit the reasons for it and our sense of shame drives the agony inward, and our desires are trapped in narrow bounds without escape and stifle themselves. From this arise melancholy and mourning and a thousand vacillations of a wavering mind, buoyed up by the birth of hope and sickened by the death of it. From this arises the state of mind of those who loathe their own leisure and complain that they have nothing to do, and the bitterest envy at the promotion of others. For unproductive idleness nurtures malice, and because they themselves could not prosper they want everyone else to be ruined. Then from this dislike of others’ success and despair of their own, their minds become enraged against fortune, complain about the times, retreat into obscurity, and brood over their own sufferings until they become sick and tired of themselves.

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

  • The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates. He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone.

    —Anthony Storr, Solitude a Return to the Self