Quotes About Loneliness

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.

Of course, you must know that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure, and you must be indulgent with the answer, which will perhaps often leave you empty-handed; for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.

And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside.

Read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism - such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

How much childhood is in that picture, and how everything is already settled there in the quiet, so indescribably lonely state of being a child, at the time when seated in an armchair one cannot touch the floor and with immense courage just keeps sitting there in that vast space which begins all around one and goes on and on. It is a very sweet and meaningful small picture. Thank you for letting me see it.

A happy poet who writes about his window and the glass doors of his bookcases that reflect pensively a beloved, lonely vastness. This is the poet I would have liked to become (...)

Ich will wie ein Kind im Krankenzimmer Einsam, mit heimlichem Lächeln, leise, Leise – Tage und Träume bauen.

I can see myself lying in my little high-sided bed, not sleeping and somehow vaguely intimating that that was how life would be: full of special things that are only intended for one person and cannot be told of.

Mädchen, Dichter sind, die von euch lernen das zu sagen, was ihr einsam seid; und sie lernen leben an euch Fernen, wie die Abende an großen Sternen sich gewöhnen an die Ewigkeit.

You, most lonely, most remote: how they have appropriated you for your fame. How long ago was it that they were bitterly against you, and now they embrace you as one of their own. And they carry your words around with them in the cages of their darkness and trot them out in public squares and poke them a little from within their sense of security. All your terrible beasts of prey.

because I consider this to be the highest task of a connection between two people: that both guard the others loneliness. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Aber Ihre Einsamkeit wird Ihnen auch inmitten fremder Verhältnisse Halt und Heimat sein, und aus ihr heraus werden Sie alle Ihre Wege finden.

Yo creo que casi todas nuestras tristezas son momentos de tensión que experimentamos como si se tratara de una parálisis. Porque ya no percibimos el vivir de nuestros sentidos enajenados, y nos encontramos solos con lo extraño que ha penetrado en nosotros. Porque se nos arrebata por un instante todo cuanto nos es familiar, habitual. Y porque nos hallamos en medio de una transición, en la cual no podemos detenernos.

I shivered in the hot street.

If only I have right of seeing In this wilderness of being And from the vision glorious Must come back to my lonely house.

There are a number of bogeymen that accompany us into adulthood. The biggest one is this: "I'll be old and alone with no mind, and when I die I'll be alone, adrift, isolated in a cold, dark universe." The Ego is the only part of us that believes this.

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.

We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.

You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow.

Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.

She didn't watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.

Once you kill all of us, and you're alone, you'll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moves you, nothing else! That envy moves you. Nothing else! You'll die, inevitably. You're not immortal. You're not even alive, you're nothing but moving hate.