This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
Character | Distrust | Loneliness |
Every man is an island. Each person radiates feelings to others, but ultimately we are alone. For me, the essence of life is how we handle our loneliness. There are moments when we manage to resolve this loneliness through personal relationships, especially through love. But there are also certain situations in which you feel truly alone, when even words and affection cannot ease your fears.
Character | Feelings | Life | Life | Loneliness | Love | Man | Words |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.
Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
Religion is a hunger for beauty and love and glory. It is wonder and the mystery and majesty, passion and ecstasy. It is emotion as well as mind, feeling as well as knowing, the subjective as well as the objective. It is the heart soaring to heights the head alone will never know; the apprehension of meanings science alone will never find; the awareness of values ethics alone will never reveal. It is the human spirit yearning for, and finding, something infinitely greater than itself which it calls God.
Awareness | Beauty | Ecstasy | Ethics | Glory | God | Heart | Hunger | Knowing | Love | Mind | Mystery | Passion | Religion | Science | Spirit | Will | Wisdom | Wonder | Beauty | Awareness |
Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sights are the signs of its greatest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.
Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Illusion | Loneliness | Memory | Terror | Wisdom |
At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self.
Loneliness | Self | Wisdom |
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
One ought to love society, if he wishes to enjoy solitude. It is a social nature that solitude works upon with the most various power. If one is misanthropic, and betakes himself to loneliness that he may get away from hateful things, solitude is a silent emptiness to him.
Loneliness | Love | Nature | Power | Society | Solitude | Wisdom | Wishes |
Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan Ghalib
My yearning has loosened the veil hiding Beauty. She is now mine - but alas, my own sight is there blocking the view. The beat of my own heart sounds in my ear. The wish to live as others do has long been silenced. What does their world have to offer? Nothing but the echo of voices yelling, “more, more.”
Loneliness is a game of pretense, for the essential loneliness is an escape from an inescapable God.
God | Loneliness |
D. W. Harding, fully Denys Clement Wyatt Harding
A necessary quality for the attainment of individuality is the ability to tolerate some degree of loneliness in the sense of independent adherence to values that those around you will not support.
Ability | Attainment | Individuality | Loneliness | Sense | Will |
The secret to overcoming a feeling of loneliness is not gong outside to meet people. That will only keep you from being alone. The secret is going inside yourself, to realize your true kinship with God and with all the human beings that he created.
God | Loneliness | People | Will | God |
Every one of us is endowed at birth with all sorts of magnificent possibilities and potentialities. There is a capacity for idealism, a yearning for truth and beauty and nobility, a sensitivity to the hurt of others and to the dreams and needs of our fellow man. In the hopeful dawn of youth we feel these stirrings within us and we promise to bring them to life. And yet so often as the years pass by we permit these promises to be swept under the rug of expediency. We chalk them up to immaturity and we go on to live “more realistically.”
Beauty | Birth | Capacity | Dawn | Dreams | Idealism | Life | Life | Man | Nobility | Promise | Truth | Youth | Youth | Beauty |
The most isolating form of loneliness is not to be apart from people; it is to be apathetic to them, to be indifferent to them, to feel unrelated to them.
Loneliness | People |
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
Prayer is an expression of man’s inner yearning for a response in the awful silence of the universe. It is a unique process of discovery whereby the searching ego affirms itself in the very moment of self-negation, and thus discovers its own worth and justification as a dynamic factor in the life of the universe.
Discovery | Dynamic | Ego | Justification | Life | Life | Man | Prayer | Self | Silence | Unique | Universe | Worth | Discovery |
Its effects on the soul is to be measured neither by the guilt nor by the temporal punishment inexorably fixed, but by that deep sense of loneliness it brings with it.
Guilt | Loneliness | Punishment | Sense | Soul |