Quotes About Isolation

I believe that almost all our sadnesses are periods of tautening that we experience as numbers because we can no longer hear the stirring of our feelings, which have become foreign to us.

Even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue.

Lo que se necesita no es más que esto: soledad, gran soledad interior. Adentrarse en sí mismo y no encontrarse con nadie durante horas: esto es lo que hay que poder alcanzar. Estar solo, como se estaba solo de niño, cuando los adultos andaban enredados con cosas que parecían importantes y grandes, porque los mayores parecían muy ocupados y porque uno no comprendía nada de lo que hacían.

Wie meine Träume nach Dir schrein. Wir sind uns mühsam fremd geworden, Jetzt will es mir die Seele morden Dies arme, bange Einsamsein. Kein Hoffen, das die Segel bauscht. Nur diese weite, weisse Stille, In die mein thatenloser Wille In athemlosem Bangen lauscht.

Wie einer, der auf fremden Meeren fuhr, so bin ich bei den ewig Einheimischen; die vollen Tage stehn auf ihren Tischen, mir aber ist die Ferne voll Figur. In mein Gesicht reicht eine Welt herein, die vielleicht unbewohnt ist wie ein Mond, sie aber lassen kein Gefühl allein, und alle ihre Worte sind bewohnt. Die Dinge, die ich weither mit mir nahm, sehn selten aus, gehalten an das Ihre -: in ihrer großen Heimat sind sie Tiere, hier halten sie den Atem an vor Scham.

but how can people who have already flung together and no longer set themselves any limits or tell one another apart, and who therefore possess nothing of their own any more, how on earth can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of a solitude that has already been spilt and squandered?

Ultimately nobody can help anyone else in life; one has this recurring experience in every conflict and confusion: that one is alone. (Letters on Life)

Du entfernst dich von mir, du Stunde. Wunden schlägt mir dein Flügelschlag. Allein: was soll ich mit meinem Munde? mit meiner Nacht? mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe. Alle Dinge, an die ich mich gebe, werden reich und geben mich aus. [Der Dichter]

Ultimately nobody can help anyone else in life; one has this recurring experience in every conflict and confusion: that one is alone. This is not as bad as it may appear at first glance; it is also the best thing about life that everyone contains everything within himself: his fate, his future, his entire scope and world.

And if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.

The carriages drove right through me, and hurrying people did not swerve aside for me and ran over me full of contempt, as over a bad place in which stale water has collected....O what a world it is! Pieces, pieces of people, parts of animals, remains of finished things, and everything still on the move, driving about as if in an uncanny wind, carried and carrying, falling and catching themselves up in their fall.

Learning-time is always a long, secluded time..

There is only one solitude, and it is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company, be it ever so banal or trivial, for the illusion of some slight correspondence with whoever one happens to come across, however unworthy… But perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring.

And so, dear sir, love your solitude, accept the pain it causes you, and make a melody with it.

You must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it.

it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; the fact that a thing is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it.

This alone is needed: solitude, vast inner solitude. To go into yourself and meet no one for hours,—you must be able to achieve this. Be alone, as you were alone as a child, while the adults went about their business, caught up in matters that seemed important and grand because the grown-ups looked so busy and because you comprehended nothing of what they did.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us.

the idea that poetic practice requires solitude. In the vision Rilke offers, solitude is not merely a matter of being alone: it is a territory to be entered and occupied, and Rilke provides for Kappus (and the rest of us) a map of how to accomplish those ends. The first step is the simple recognition that solitude exists. A lack of connection to other people

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.

Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anything except me.

Ah, I can hear you say, so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave! But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?