100+ Quotes About Loneliness That Feel Like A Big Hug

Are you feeling misunderstood and isolated? Don’t worry, friend. We all get like that sometimes. Harry Nilsson may have famously sung that “one is the loneliest number,” but know this — you’re never really alone. Perhaps it will bring you a small measure of comfort and strength to know that, at any given moment when you’re lonely, countless other people are lamenting the same sense of singularity. That doesn’t mean the way you’re feeling is any less valid or real, though. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it; loneliness sucks. It tends to hang over you like a little black rain cloud.

You know what helps sometimes? Reading what other people have said about being lonely. Because, again, there’s solidarity in numbers. So, in order to soothe your soul, we rounded up some inspiring and heart-warming loneliness quotes that will help you when you need it most.

1. “Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.” ― Douglas Coupland
2. “When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death – ourselves.” – Eda J. LeShan
3. “But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” ― Bell Hooks
4. “Maybe true love isn’t out there for me, but I can sublimate my loneliness with the notion that true love is out there for someone.” – Roxane Gay
5. “Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” ― Maya Angelou
6. “The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.” — Johann Wolfgange Von Goethe
7. “I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert
8. “Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.” ― John Steinbeck
9. “There are worse things than feeling alone. Things like being with someone and still feeling alone.”- M.W Poetry
10. “Tore up my heart and shut it down. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. A simple little kind of free. Nothing to do, no one but me, and that’s all I need. I’m perfectly lonely.” – John Mayer
11. “A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings. Remember that next time you feel alone.” — Mandy Hale
12. “Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they’re big, flashing signs that something needs to change.” – Gretchen Rubin
13. “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” — Michel de Montaigne
14. “People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don’t think that’s true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.” ― Kim Culbertson
15. “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
16. “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel all alone.” – Robin Williams
17. “Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness.” – Janet Fitch
18. “We live as we dream–alone….” ― Joseph Conrad
19. “Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.” – Henry Rollins
20. “Sometimes you need to take a break from everyone and spend time alone to experience, appreciate, and love yourself.” – Robert Tew
21. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.” ― Aldous Huxley
22. “I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it’s good for me…” ― Louisa May Alcott
23. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
24. “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
25. “I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.” ― Daniel Keyes
26. “Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
27. “Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.” — Pearl Buck
28. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.” ― Mitch Albom
29. “If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.” ― Criss Jami
30. “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
31. “The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.” ― Deb Caletti
32. “Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.”― Marty Rubin
33. “If you want to miss your crown follow the crowd. If you want to wear the crown, go alone and be yourself. – Israelmore Ayivor
34. “Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.” ― D.H. Lawrence
35. “It is better to be lonely than allow people who are not going anywhere keep you from your destiny.” – Joel Osteen
36. “The best part about being alone is that you really don’t have to answer to anybody. You do what you want.” – Justin Timberlake
37. “If you are alone, you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion, you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct, and if you have more than one companion, you will fall more deeply into the same plight.” – Leonardo da Vinci
38. “Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.” ― David Foster Wallace
39. “We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” ― Rudyard Kipling
40. I’m fascinated with myself and love hearing the sound of my own voice. I’d like to hear what I have to say. A lot of people don’t like being alone because they truly don’t like themselves but I love me.” –Gene Simmons
41. “People Die…Beauty Fades…Love Changes…And You Will Always Be Alone” ― L.J. Smith,
42. “There’s nothing abnormal about loneliness.” – Paula Stokes
43. “People drain me, even the closest of friends, and I find loneliness to be the best state in the union to live in.” – Margaret Cho
44. “I like being alone. I have control over my own shit. Therefore, in order to win me over, your presence has to feel better than my solitude. You’re not competing with another person, you’re competing with my comfort zones.” – Horacio Jones
45. “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” ― Edith Wharton
46. “She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered ‘different.’ She did not suffer too much.” ― Betty Smith
47. “Being alone and actually sitting with our own thoughts can lead to such growth and realizations that are rare in our everyday busy lives.” – Kourtney Kardashian
48. “If you smile when you are alone, then you really mean it.” ― Andy Rooney
49. “…I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.” ― Susan Cain
50. “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” ― May Sarton
51. “Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.” ― Mark Helprin
52. “As I get older I’m more and more comfortable being alone.” – Sienna Miller
53. “If you are afraid of being lonely don’t try to be right.” –Jules Renard
54. “Lonely was much better than alone.” ― Toni Morrison
55. “People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
56. “What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.” – Ellen Burstyn
57. “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.” ― Wendell Berry
58. “Sometimes I think that my own company is more suitable for me than if I were around others. Because of the person that I am.” –Kyle Labe
59. “You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.” ― Amit Ray
60. “The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.” – Alice Walker
61. “Find company within yourself and you’ll never spend a day alone. Find love within yourself and you’ll never have a lonely day.” –Connor Chalfant
62. “Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt in solitude, where we are least alone.”― George Gordon Byron
63. “If loneliness was a choice, what was the other option? To settle for second-best and try to be happy with that? And was that fair to the person you settled for?” ― Lisa Kleypas
64. “All men’s misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone.” –Jean de La Bruyère
65. “You may not enjoy loneliness, because loneliness is sad. But solitude is something else; solitude is what you look forward to when you want to be alone, when you want to be with yourself. So, solitude is something we all need from time to time.” – Ruskin Bond
66. “Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.” – Eugene O’Neill
67. “All great and precious things are lonely.” ― John Steinbeck
68. What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.”― Dag Hammarskjöld
69. “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” – Henrik Ibsen
70. “If you learn to really sit with loneliness and embrace it for the gift that it is…an opportunity to get to know YOU, to learn how strong you really are, to depend on no one but YOU for your happiness…you will realize that a little loneliness goes a LONG way in creating a richer, deeper, more vibrant and colorful YOU.” ― Mandy Hale
71. “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” ― George Eliot
72. “Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.” – Martha Beck
73. “In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.” – Laurence Sterne
74. “Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.” ― Marilynne Robinson
75. “It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company.” – George Washington
76. “My music is very personal. I’ve created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound – the expression of loneliness. That’s what it’s all about.” – Dwight Yoakam
77. “My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.” ― Khalil Gibran
78. “If you are afraid of being lonely, don’t try to be right.” ― Jules Renard
79. “When everything is lonely I can be my best friend.” – Conor Oberst
80. “To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.” ― Suzanne Gordon
81. “A lonely day is God’s way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.” – Criss Jami
82. “To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.” – Henri J.M. Nouwen
83. “I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.” ― Sylvia Plath
84. “I’ve noticed that loneliness gets stronger when we try to face it down, but gets weaker when we simply ignore it.”― Paulo Coelho
85. “When I get lonely these days, I think: So Be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert
86. “The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.”― Mary Balogh
87. “The only place I’ve felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There’s something in the water there that connects me to that place. There’s also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I’ve never been able to shake.” – Jessica Lange
88. “Sometimes being surronded by everyone is the loneliest, because you’ll realise you have no one to turn to.”― Soraya
89. “But I welcomed the loneliness, which had everything to do with being anonymous. It’s never loneliness that nibbles away at a person’s insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone.” ― Rachel Sontag
90. “When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death – ourselves.” ― Eda LeShan
91. “Loneliness is painful. But suffering is not wrong in and of itself. It’s part of the human experience, and in a way brings us closer to all people.”― Juliette Fay
92. “Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.” – Erma Bombeck
93. ‘We are all born alone and die alone. The loneliness is definitely part of the journey of life.” – Jenova Chen
94. “When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.” ― Louis L’Amour
95. “I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.” ― Orhan Pamuk
96. “We can all fight against loneliness by engaging in random acts of kindness.” – Gail Honeyman
97. “…Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.” ― Virginia Woolf
98. “I’ve also seen that great men are often lonely. This is understandable, because they have built such high standards for themselves that they often feel alone. But that same loneliness is part of their ability to create.” – Yousuf Karsh
99. “Even in the loneliest moments O have been therefor myself.” ― Sanober Khan
100. “But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it’s by way of heartbreak, sometimes it’s by way of injustice, sometimes it’s by way of fate. There’s an infinite number of ways to examine it.” – Tom Hanks
101. “Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.” – Lawrence Durrell
102. “The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn’t subdue you and make you feel abject. It’s stimulating loneliness.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
103. “The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.” ― Hubert Van Zeller
104. “Solitude is not the same as loneliness. Solitude is a solitary boat floating in a sea of possible companions.” – Robert Fulghum
105. “For fear you will be alone you do so many things that aren’t you at all.” ― Richard Brautigan
106. “The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.” – Tom Wolfe
107. “Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.” – Mo Yan
108. “There are some places in life where you can only go alone. Embrace the beauty of your solo journey.” ― Mandy Hale