Quotes About Isolation

We could work less and buy less. It would prevent the environment—our habitat—from being systematically destroyed. But we don't do it, because we are isolated in our individual cages.

Big Pharma was offering the solution that an isolated, materialistic culture thought it needed—one you can buy. We had lost the ability to understand that there are some problems that can't be solved by shopping.

And many of our scientists imagine the root cause of addiction can be found on a brain scan, in a society that is falling apart, where many people have no friends, where they are taught life is all about buying things and showing them off on Instagram, where they are experiencing more and more humiliation as each day passes.

The stunning thing was that loneliness is not merely the result of depression," he told me. "Indeed—it leads to depression.

This use of solitary confinement is a standard punishment in American prisons. Not long before this, a mentally disabled man in another Arizona prison called Mark Tucker was kept in solitary for so many years, with his pleas for a cellmate refused, that he eventually set himself on fire. In the hospital, with 80 percent of his body burned, he was informed that the Department of Corrections was charging him $1.8 million to pay for the medical care14 to treat his injuries.

have become the first humans to ever dismantle our tribes. As a result, we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness.

Joe felt like his human thoughts and insights and feelings were almost a defect.

people will never choose to bring drugs into the legal realm of regulation so long as they believe they are demonic substances that hijack most of their users and destroy them. When they discover that these drugs are in fact less dangerous than alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma and isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches.

It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

Padecer depresión y ansiedad consiste en un proceso por el que te conviertes en prisionero de tu ego y no dejas que entre el aire del exterior.

today's flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief.

If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.

Addiction," he said, "is a disease of loneliness.

As John was proving how this effect plays out in humans, other scientists were investigating it in other animals. For example, Professor Martha McClintock separated out lab rats. Some were raised in a cage, alone. Others were raised in groups. The isolated rats developed eighty-four times the number of breast cancer tumors as the rats who had a community.

Jean tells me the drug dealers he used to work for are "completely against this program. They can control people in weak states and make money from them. If I was still in the criminal milieu, they could make me a killer, I would do anything." As he said this, I thought of Chino and Rosalio. "But now? No. I am lost for them.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.

Nothing is more dangerous than solitude.

No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself; it is a child of solitude.

It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being... He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instil his strength into the invalid by whose bedside he is seated.

By Fortune's adverse buffets overborne To solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn, And not in utter loneliness to live, Myself at last did to the Devil give!

To speak the truth, as truth to me appeared, Caused noisy protests, I was hooted down. Such unpleasant incidents occurred That I ran off so as to be alone, Into the wilds. Utterly forsaken, I took at last the Devil for companion.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.