45 Quotes About Isolation and Loneliness

Loneliness is a killer for many. Finding yourself in a situation of isolation can leave you feel discontent and off focused. These quotes about isolation and loneliness capture the feelings of despair associated with these emotions.

“As a writer, you live in such isolation. It’s hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.”

“Border strengthening is effective, but not if done in isolation. We also need to give priority to establishing public institutions that deliver a sustained level of security and justice for citizens.”

“Business gives you a massive high. Doing a great deal, coming up with an inspirational solution… It’s very addictive. But it doesn’t last long. In isolation, it’s a bit sterile. It doesn’t reward the soul.”

“Coming to know one another based on a shared humanity through dialogue is the key to breaking down the walls of isolation and reversing the decline of life-to-life bonds among human beings.”

“Earth’s dispossessed are vulnerable targets for extremists: those who teach that global justice is meaningless; that satisfaction can come only in violence, division, and intellectual isolation.”

“Helping reproductive services doesn’t just help women in isolation. It helps men just as much.”

“I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.”

“I cannot write in isolation. I write with people around me.”

“I grew up on a farm in Oregon, an adopted child, with one sibling, and parents the age of all my peers’ grandparents. We lived in isolation from the people around us, and it was always a struggle to cope with as a child.”

“I know people who have, until recently, lived with dirt floors. There are people who live way back off the grid, without electricity. Not a whole lot, but quite a few. That’s a choice for a lot of them. There might be a religious element in their isolation, at least with some of them.”

“I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.”

“I need some isolation, it’s necessary to me, that’s just who I am. I need to be left alone.”

“I think, if you have enough inner resources, then you can live in isolation for long periods of time and not feel diminished by it.”

“I was obsessed with the idea of fasting and isolation.”

“If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.”

“If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you’ll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness.”

“If you want to end your isolation, you must be honest about what you want at a core level and decide to go after it.”

“I’m not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.”

“Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.”

“Many people, especially young people, would like to be more independent and on their own. But it is very difficult and they suffer from feelings of isolation. I think that is one reason why young readers support my work.”

“Most people are enduring a marginalized isolation. One of the great obstacles to modern friendships is the ‘religion of rush.’ People are rushing all the time through time. Friendship takes time.”

“My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation – often elevated loneliness – to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.”

“My upbringing has given me sympathy for the idea of isolation and what it is to be a new person in the room, where everyone else has some amount of familiarity and comfort.”

“Part of me still feels like I’ve never had the opportunity to properly express all my earliest influences, so for now, I find isolation to be my biggest influence.”

“So many writers grew up in tortured isolation, in revolt against their families. I and my sister were in a house where writing was considered the worthiest thing you could try to do.”

“Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.”

“Something people don’t recognize is that being on the space station is probably a lot like being in some kind of confinement – like isolation.”

“The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.”

“The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.”

“The Internet has made some phenomenal breakthroughs that are still only poorly understood in terms of changing people’s ideas of us and them.”

“The mere suggestion that not speaking for a day can give you an appreciation of the social isolation that comes with the experience of disability, particularly those whose impairments prohibit them from communicating verbally, is insensitive at best.”

“The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.”

“The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy.”

“The way most people approach business – and the way they mostly teach in business school – involves the analytical mind. It divides it up and looks at parts in isolation.”

“The worst cruelty that can be inflicted on a human being is isolation.”

“There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.”

“There’s a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.”

“There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.”

“There’s something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.”

“Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts.”

“Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.”

“We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn’t be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.”

“We feel no isolation. But, having said that, I want to emphasize in particular that we do not want to go to extremes and abandon the European and American directions in our foreign economic cooperation.”

“When I’m writing, I’m in an isolation chamber. I’m not one to think about that outside world stuff when I’m writing.”

“When you’re just focused on nutrition and hunger, that’s a harder, harder lift in isolation.”

Dealing with isolation can give you severe health risks. From being left in a terrible cycle of constant challenge, reaching out to others for help will bring you back centered.