Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

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

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

Many creative activities are predominantly solitary. They are concerned with self-realization and self-development in isolation, or with finding some coherent pattern in life.

—Anthony Storr, Solitude a Return to the Self

When we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we’re not able to appreciate who they are. It’s as though we’re using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.

—Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people.

—Thomas Merton,No Man Is an Island