This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.
Loneliness | People | Taste | Wonder |
John Oxenham, pen name for Wiliam Arthur Dunkerley
Stretch a hand to one unfriended, and thy loneliness is ended.
John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
Only those who have experienced ultimate not-knowing, the voicelessness of a soul struck by wonder, total muteness, are able to enter the meaning of God, a meaning greater than the mind. There is a loneliness in us that hears. When the soul parts from the company of the ego and its retinue of petty concepts; when we cease to exploit all things but instead pray the world’s cry, the world’s sigh, our loneliness may hear the living grace beyond all power.
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
Agony | Enough | Happy | Loneliness | Search | Soul | Child |
We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must “log on” somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all.
Better | Loneliness | Need | Sense | Time |
Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.
Control | Ego | Giving | Loneliness | Means | Property | Relationship | Superiority | Will | World |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
Touched by an Angel. We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love's light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.
Courage | Fear | Light | Loneliness | Love | Pleasure | Will |
Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.
Alienation | Loneliness |
Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich
Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man are being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.
Distinguish | Glory | Language | Loneliness | Man | Pain | Solitude | Understanding |
At times, when loneliness seems to crush all beauty, the only way to resist is to remain open… Avoiding problems you need to face is avoiding the life you need to live… Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience… Be crazy! But learn how to be crazy without being the center of attention. Be brave enough to live different… Be creative. Remember that we only learnt how to fly when we stopped imitating birds… Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains.
Enough | Life | Life | Loneliness | Need | Nothing | Problems | Learn |
Joy goes against the foundations of mathematics: it multiplies when we divide… Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken… Join with those who sing, tell stories, talk pleasure in life, and have joy in their eyes, because joy is contagious, and can prevent others from becoming paralyzed by depression, loneliness and difficulties… Judging oneself to be inferior to other people was one of the worst acts of pride because it was the most destructive.
Change | Day | Experience | Faith | Journey | Joy | Loneliness | Magic | People | Pleasure | Pride | Search | Will |
Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya, aka Rabi'a of Basra or Basri, Saint Rabia of Basra
The source of my suffering and loneliness is deep in my heart. This is a disease no doctor can cure. Only Union with the Friend can cure it. Your hope in my heart is the rarest treasure Your Name on my tongue is the sweetest word My choicest hours Are the hours I spend with You – O God, I can’t live in this world Without remembering You– How can I endure the next world Without seeing Your face? I am a stranger in Your country And lonely among Your worshippers: This is the substance of my complaint.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
There is a passion in me, that doesn't long for anything, from another human being. I was given something else, a hat, to wear in both worlds. It fell off. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter.
Freedom | Life | Life | Loneliness | World |
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear, each secret fishy hope or fear. Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond; but is there anything beyond? This life cannot be all, they swear, for how unpleasant, if it were! One may not doubt that, somehow, Good Shall come of Water and of Mud; And, sure, the reverent eye must see a Purpose in Liquidity.
Death | Loneliness | Will |
Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.
Murder and theft have been committed since the earliest history of mankind, but that fact has not made murder meritorious or larceny legal.
Books | Choice | Conscience | Deeds | Earth | God | Heart | Lesson | Life | Life | Little | Loneliness | Mankind | Mind | Nature | Prejudice | Solitude | Study | Truth | Will | Words | Deeds | God |
I practice going home by walking, sitting, and doing things in mindfulness so I do not lose myself.
Loneliness | Soul |
You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right... The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important. In our age everything has to be a ‘problem.’ Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning, from God, to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety. Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem.
Fulfillment | Labor | Loneliness | Vision |