"We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness"
About this Quote
Crowds can be a kind of anesthesia: they numb you to the fact that you are still alone. Schweitzer’s line turns that paradox into an accusation, not of people as individuals but of the social arrangements that let proximity masquerade as connection. “So much together” isn’t a celebration of community; it’s a picture of bodies clustered in churches, hospitals, families, and civic life - all the places a theologian and physician would have watched human beings gather - while the inner life remains unvisited.
The verb choice is the trapdoor. We’re not merely “lonely”; we are “dying of” it, as if isolation were an untreated illness. That framing fits Schweitzer’s broader moral project: an ethics of responsibility (“reverence for life”) that demands more than correct belief or public virtue. It’s a critique of performative togetherness - ritual without intimacy, charity without attention, society without recognition.
The subtext cuts both ways. It’s a warning to modernity, where industrial life was beginning to standardize human relations into roles: worker, parishioner, patient, colonized subject. But it’s also a warning to religion itself. A theological community can become an efficient loneliness machine if it offers belonging as membership rather than encounter. Schweitzer implies that salvation talk is cheap if it doesn’t produce the hard, unspectacular work of seeing another person fully.
He’s not romanticizing solitude; he’s diagnosing a social failure. The line still lands because it describes a familiar condition: being surrounded yet untouched, connected yet unheld, together in public while starving in private.
The verb choice is the trapdoor. We’re not merely “lonely”; we are “dying of” it, as if isolation were an untreated illness. That framing fits Schweitzer’s broader moral project: an ethics of responsibility (“reverence for life”) that demands more than correct belief or public virtue. It’s a critique of performative togetherness - ritual without intimacy, charity without attention, society without recognition.
The subtext cuts both ways. It’s a warning to modernity, where industrial life was beginning to standardize human relations into roles: worker, parishioner, patient, colonized subject. But it’s also a warning to religion itself. A theological community can become an efficient loneliness machine if it offers belonging as membership rather than encounter. Schweitzer implies that salvation talk is cheap if it doesn’t produce the hard, unspectacular work of seeing another person fully.
He’s not romanticizing solitude; he’s diagnosing a social failure. The line still lands because it describes a familiar condition: being surrounded yet untouched, connected yet unheld, together in public while starving in private.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Albert
Add to List
