This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What makes loneliness an aguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my burden to bear.
Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
Enough | Loneliness |
The longest journey is the journey inwards. Of him who has chosen his destiny, who has started upon his quest for the source of his being (Is there a source?). He is still with you, but without relation, isolated in your feeling like one condemned to death or one whom imminent farewell prematurely dedicates to the loneliness which is the final lot of all. Between you and him is distance, uncertainty - care.
Care | Death | Destiny | Journey | Loneliness | Uncertainty |
What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.
Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi
In the absence of discriminating thoughts, the mind as we know it ceases to exist. Our suffering - our feeling of discomfort, alienation, loneliness - arises because we create a dualistic way of perceiving everything that separates us from the external. When we view the so-called external phenomenal world as distinct from ourselves, then fear arises, fear that we will lose our lives, that we may not continue to exist. Out of that fear come anger, jealousy, greed, hatred, aversion, attachment - all kinds of clinging. All our problems arise out of seeing ourselves as separate entities. We cling to what we perceive as me; my physical body and my ideas, my mind, my thoughts, my understanding, my beliefs, my concepts, my opinions.
Absence | Alienation | Anger | Body | Fear | Greed | Ideas | Jealousy | Loneliness | Mind | Problems | Suffering | Understanding | Will | World |
If humanity is to have a hopeful future, there is no escape from the preeminent involvement and responsibility of the single human soul, in all its loneliness and frailty.
Future | Humanity | Loneliness | Responsibility | Soul |
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Daring | Disease | Loneliness | People |
Your spirit’s life, my brother, is encompassed by loneliness, and were it not for that loneliness and solitude, you would not be you, nor would I be I. Were it not for this loneliness and solitude, I would come to believe on hearing your voice that is was my voice speaking; or seeing your face, that it was myself looking into a mirror.
Life | Life | Loneliness | Solitude | Spirit |
Loneliness is dangerous… because if loneliness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.
Devil | God | Loneliness | Self |
The many-faceted thing called love succeeds in building bridges from the loneliness on this shore to the loneliness on the other one. These bridges can be of great beauty, but they are rarely built for eternity, and frequently they cannot tolerate too heavy a burden without collapsing.
Beauty | Eternity | Loneliness | Love |
Life is an island in an ocean of loneliness, an island whose rocks are hopes, whose trees are dreams, whose flowers are solitude, and whose brooks are thirst. Your life, my fellow men, is an island separated from all other islands and regions. No matter how many are the ships that leave your shores for other climes, no matter how many are the fleets that touch your coast, you remain a solitary island, suffering the pangs of loneliness and yearning for happiness. You are unknown to your fellow men and far removed from their sympathy and understanding.
Dreams | Life | Life | Loneliness | Men | Solitude | Suffering | Sympathy | Understanding |
Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich
Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
Glory | Language | Loneliness | Pain | Solitude |
Despair over loneliness will increase the suffering. Looking at the time available as a precious gift will decrease it.
Despair | Loneliness | Suffering | Time | Will |
Chief Seattle, also spelled Seathl
What is man without beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
Failure | Loneliness | Failure |
The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.
Loneliness | Soul |
Hilaire Belloc, fully Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc
When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.
Loneliness | Men | Space | World | Friendship |
If money were more important to us we would understand how it influences everything in our lives. Love and hatred, eating and sleeping, safety and danger, work and rest, marriage, children, fear, loneliness ... think of where we go, how we travel, with whom we associate ... The money factor is there, wrapped around or lodged inside everything. Money is the raw material out of which we build our lives. But because we don't take money more seriously, we have come to know the price of everything and the meaning of nothing.
Important | Loneliness | Love | Meaning | Money | Price | Work | Think | Understand |
To be lonely, that is to feel oneself isolated, having no relationship with anything; in that sense of loneliness there is despair - there are moods, one is familiar with that sense of loneliness - and one runs away from it by turning on the radio, by reading a book, by sex and ten different activities. That loneliness is the very essence of self-consciousness. And when one goes beyond that, there is this state of attention in which there is complete aloneness, which is not isolation, which is not separation, which is not a withdrawal. Because it is only this aloneness, when the mind is no longer a plaything of thought, when thought has been understood totally - then out of that comes this sense of aloneness. it is that which is innocence, and it is that innocence which is beyond all mortality.
Attention | Despair | Innocence | Loneliness | Mind | Reading | Relationship | Sense | Thought | Thought |