Difficult Emotions: Loneliness Quotes

Loneliness can feel isolating, yet it also invites reflection and self-discovery. This collection brings together thoughtful lines that recognize the ache of distance while honoring the quiet strength found in solitude and stillness. Use these quotes to find language for difficult moments, spark compassion toward yourself and others, and notice small openings for connection. Whether you are seeking calm, clarity, or reassurance, the voices here offer gentle perspective to help navigate waves of emotion with patience, presence, and renewed hope.

Similar topics:Anger Anxiety Betrayal Fear Sadness

"I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God"

Robert Browning, Poet

Robert Browning

"Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching"

Alan Bennett, Dramatist

Alan Bennett

"Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!"

William Shakespeare, Dramatist

William Shakespeare

"We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness"

Albert Schweitzer, Theologian

Albert Schweitzer

"Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely"

Erma Bombeck, Journalist

Erma Bombeck

"If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company"

Jean-Paul Sartre, Philosopher

Jean-Paul Sartre

"None knows the weight of another's burden"

George Herbert, Poet

George Herbert

"I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell"

Audre Lorde, Poet

Audre Lorde

"Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat"

Mother Teresa, Leader

Mother Teresa

"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone"

Orson Welles, Actor

Orson Welles

"Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot"

Bob Dylan, Musician

Bob Dylan

"Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome"

T. S. Eliot, Poet

T. S. Eliot

"I have no friends and I never leave my house"

Megan Fox, Actress

"Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone"

Paul Tillich, Theologian

Paul Tillich

"But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude"

Harold Bloom, Critic

Harold Bloom

"Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool"

Liv Ullmann, Actress

Liv Ullmann

"Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me"

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Philosopher

"I spent a lot of time feeling alienated and rejected"

Lisa Bonet, Actress

Lisa Bonet

"Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies"

Elizabeth Bowen, Novelist

"I'm tired of trying to get other people to see into my brain. I'm done"

Todd McFarlane, Artist

"In the country of pain we are each alone"

May Sarton, Poet

May Sarton

"You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming"

Emily Carr, Artist

"Solitude vivifies; isolation kills"

Joseph Roux, Clergyman

"As a teenager at high school, I felt like an outsider"

Shawn Ashmore, Actor

"Acting is the greatest answer to my loneliness that I have found"

Claire Danes, Actress

"Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not"

Anna Neagle, Actress

Anna Neagle

"The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book"

Paul Kane, Writer

"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful"

Albert Camus, Philosopher

Albert Camus

"With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves"

Eric Hoffer, Writer

Eric Hoffer

"We movie stars all end up by ourselves. Who knows? Maybe we want to"

Bette Davis, Actress

Bette Davis

"We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life"

Tennessee Williams, Dramatist

Tennessee Williams

"I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone"

Audrey Hepburn, Actress

Audrey Hepburn

"One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way"

Vincent Van Gogh, Artist

Vincent Van Gogh

"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty"

Mother Teresa, Leader

Mother Teresa

"People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about"

Anton Chekhov, Dramatist

Anton Chekhov

"If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right"

Jules Renard, Dramatist

Jules Renard

"Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President's widow?"

Jackie Kennedy, First Lady

"There's a difference between solitude and loneliness"

Maggie Smith, Actress

Maggie Smith

"I like the idea of being alone. I like the idea of often being alone in all aspects of my life. I like to feel lonely. I like to need things"

Robert Plant, Musician

Robert Plant

"All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone"

Jean de La Bruyère, Philosopher

Jean de La Bruyère

Page 1 of 14