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Aloneness Quotes

Browse 260 quotes about Aloneness.

Aloneness Quotes

“Stories allow you to experience places you could never go - the past, the future, or distant worlds. You can become a different ethnicity or gender. Even when you're reading all by yourself, you're sharing those stories as they unfold before you with countless people whom you've never met. We are alone, but we are connected.”

StoriesFictionAloneness
Book:The Creative Gene: How Books, Movies, and Music Inspired the Creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid
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“Thus we are counseled at length to be careful about the company we keep, recognizing the simple fact that an unexamined lifestyle, in which we are immersed in the materialistic values and behavior of worldly friends, will get us nowhere. Only frustration and inanity will be the result. Shāntideva advises us to fight shy of those whose values are contrary to the Dharma—people he habitually refers to as “those who are like children” (in other words, in terms designed to stimulate feelings of concern rather than resentment). Thus Shāntideva prescribes solitude, a flight from the world—not of course in a puritanical, world-denying sense, but in a spirit of inner freedom. Tranquillity of mind, he says significantly, is “found by people who are happy to be free from worldly ties,” and who for that reason, “never turns . . . a backward glance” (8.4, 8.26). And he is lyrical in his celebration of retreat in the wilderness.”

BuddhismSolitudeDharmaAlonenessThe Path Of The BodhisattvaBodhisattva TrainingRetreat In The WildernessThe Mind Of The Bodhisattva
Book:The Way of the Bodhisattva
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“Most spiritual practises have been developed - and, in the past, were sustained - in community. But most of us do not live in community. Although my students and friends and I share many of these practices, we are only occasionally in proximity to one another. Doing a daily practice alone is difficult. It requires not so much a heroic discipline as a deep commitment to life, a willingness to dedicate our lives to something larger than ourselves.”

IsolationAlonenessSocietal DegredationDays Of OldSense Of Community
Book:The Invitation
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“Over the years, I'd gradually come to believe that family is like your shadow on a sunny day, always there, just over your shoulder, following you in spirit no matter where you are or what you're doing...With [my grandfather's] passing, however, the days are now endlessly cloudy, and when I glance over my shoulder, there is nothing there at all. I know there are others in my situation, but that doesn't make me feel any better. It just makes me think that no shadows follow them either; that they, like me, often feel entirely alone. [Trevor Benson]”

FamilyAloneness
Book:The Return
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“Ruefully, nobody perceives me as exceptionally gifted, intelligent, handsome, or physically strong. My sense of alienation stems from an inferiority complex, depressive nature, and manic tendencies that repulse other people. For many years, I passively accepted my clumsiness, uselessness, and lack of capacity for learning by avoiding serious literature and other opportunities for personal growth. I embraced personal ignorance by favoring tactile sensations and gross pleasure afforded in a materialistic culture that revels in a hedonistic lifestyle.”

IsolatedExileAlienationAlonenessRecluseInferiority ComplexManic DepressionSelf Isolation
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“A sundry of intimate encounters with the vibrant intellect of perceptive thinkers dissolves a recluse’s shroud of seclusion. Can I manufacture the needed first aid kit to arrest my internal hemorrhaging? Can I stave off my mental deterioration by exploring the written words of renowned authors? Can I map a course out of my present quandary by scouring the libraries brimming with the beautiful mind works of previous generations of eminent writers? Will diligent encounters with the incisive thoughts of outstanding essayist shred the indivisible bars shielding my indeterminate self and release me from of the monochrome cage of self-imposed isolation? Can respected writers’ perceptive soul-searching create a template for my inchoative thoughts spontaneously to mature?”

MemoirWritersWriters On WritingAlonenessMemoir WritingRecluseWriters On ThinkingSeclusionEssayist
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“He cleared his throat. "Can I ask you, what does a woman mean when she says she needs space?" He put his hand to his chest. "I have lost my wife, she has left, and it hurts so deeply." I stifled a laugh, not because I thought he pain (or inebriation, if that's what it was) was funny, but because it was too ridiculous. After all this, to be happily sitting alone on a beach on my fortieth birthday and be called upon by a male stranger to answer for his aloneness.”

SolitudeBeing SingleAlonenessAlone But Not LonelyBirthdays
Book:No One Tells You This
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“Associate with companions who are in harmony with the Dharma and who don't promote disturbing emotions. Keeping company with unwholesome friends, you cannot possibly avoid being influenced by their evil ways. That is the root of going astray […] Tsogyal, if you want to avoid this way of going astray, cut your ties to superfluous companions and remain in solitude!”

SolitudeCompanionshipDharmaAlonenessSpiritual FriendshipAdvice From The Lotus BornPadmasambhava
Book:Advice from the Lotus-Born: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal and Other Close Disciples
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“Tsogyal, if you want to practice the Dharma in an authentic way, it is most important to cut your ties to unwholesome places, companions, and so forth. So give them up!”

SolitudeDharmaAlonenessSpiritual FriendshipAdvice From The Lotus BornPadmasambhava
Book:Advice from the Lotus-Born: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal and Other Close Disciples
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“Tapascharya, spiritual practice means: accepting the truth that you are alone; that there is no way one can have a friend, a companion. No matter how much you long for it, regardless of how much you close your eyes and dream of them – you will still remain alone. For lives you built a home, you built a family, and then you lost it – and all through that you have always remained alone. Not even slightly has your aloneness been ever affected. So one who has known, one who has accepted that he is alone, for him there is an indication in this sutra: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING. Only being is yours, nothing else.”

EnlightenmentBlissAlonenessShiva Sutra
Book:Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery
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“THE CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE ATMAN, THE SOUL. The first meaning is: in this world, only consciousness is yours. The word atman means: that which is your own. Regardless of how much the rest may appear to you as your own, it is alien. All of that which you otherwise claim as yours – friends, loved ones, family, wealth, fame, high position, a great empire – it is all a deception. Because one day death will snatch it all away from you. So death is the criterion for determining who is your own and who is the stranger. That which death can separate you from, know that it didn’t belong to you, and that which it can’t, was indeed your own.”

SoulEnlightenmentBlissAlonenessAtmanShiva Sutra
Book:Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery
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“I have always been a loner. Even as a child, when my family and friends were off attending parties I would be sequestered in my room, sketchpad in hand, stereo by my side, listening to seductive R&B. Solitude was something I took for granted. Coming from a large family I needed solitude in order to think straight and paint my way out of confusion. My parents were accepting of the fact that I kept to myself and they respected my decision even though it went against my Somali upbringing, a culture rooted in boisterousness and joie de vivre.”

SolitudeAlonenessSomali
Author:Diriye Osman
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“After all, the entire process of "getting along" is nothing more than a cycle of deception. You're lying to yourself and others. They acknowledge that they're being deceived, and you acknowledge that they're deceiving you [. . .] In the end, it's nothing more than falsehood, suspicion, and deceit.”

FriendshipArroganceDeceitSuspicionAlonenessLonerHachiman Hikigaya
Book:やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4
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“There comes a time or two in life when you should face isolation. No, you have to. Constantly being accompanied, having someone by your side always and forever -- that is far more abnormal and creepy. I'm positive you can only learn and feel certain things when you're alone. If there are lessons to gain from having friends, then so also are there lessons from not having friends. These two things are two sides of the same coin and should be treated as equally valuable. So this moment, too, will also have worth for that girl.”

RomanceFriendshipAlonenessLonerAbnormalHachiman HikigayaSocial Capital
Book:やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4
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“Her, enveloped in the smell of the snow, and her cold fingertips, and the sound of the black clouds drifting through the sky so high above, and her heart, and my feelings, and our apartment. . . The snow soaks up every sound. Only the sounds of the train she rides reach my pricked-up ears. I . . . and probably she, too . . . like this world, I think.”

LoveFeelingsFriendshipCatAlonenessMakoto ShinkaiChobiMiyuShe And Her Cat
Book:She and Her Cat
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“Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods, the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will not hear his voice all day. He remembers what the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping. The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense of what is not. The January silence is the sound of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding, or the scraping calls of a single blue jay. Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute. Many days in the woods he wonders what it is that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure, but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit. He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying. For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning coldness of her head when he kissed her just after. There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness. It is, he decides, a quality without definition. How strange to discover that one lives with the heart as one lives with a wife. Even after many years, nobody knows what she is like. The heart has a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes, is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late. Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods, leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.”

AlonenessWidowed
Book:Refusing Heaven: Poems
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“It is only the mind which does not belong that can be alone. And aloneness is not something to be cultivated. You see this? When you see all this, you are out, and no governor or president is going to invite you to dinner. Out of that aloneness there is humility. It is this aloneness that knows love—not power. The ambitious man, religious or ordinary, will never know what love is. So, if one sees all this, then one has this quality of total living and therefore total action. This comes through self-knowledge. Krishnamurti, Jiddu. The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti (Kindle Locations 933-936). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.”

FreedomPowerHumilitySelf KnowledgeAloneness
Book:The Book of Life: Daily Meditations With Krishnamurti
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