The Lonely Soul, The Spectrum of Being Alone

“ Was I made for solitude or for a life in which there was no one to whom I could speak? The inability to communicate one's thoughts is in very truth the most terrible of all kinds of loneliness. Difference is a mask—which is more ironbound than any iron mask and perfect friendship is possible only inter pares! ”

“ The loneliness, with nothing to do but think and pray, was intolerable. She was realising that it is never good for one to feel the sense of being absolutely alone, for one would grow morbid, and distort the realities, and become fearful or bitter, as she feared she would do. ”

“ When love has gone from us is loneliness.
The crying of a little child at night
In the big dark is crowding loneliness.
Slow death of woman on a Kansas farm;
The ache of those who think beyond their time;
Pain unassuaged of isolated lives,—
All this is loneliness.
Oh, we who are one body of one soul!
Great soul of man born into social form! ”

“ There had been other Easter Sundays; there had been other days of snow and sleet and rain, but he had never felt this description of loneliness before. It was not depression. Depression sat there, certainly, as it were upon the doorstep, ready to enter at the faintest sound of invitation. But as yet, she was on the doorstep only, and this--this leaden weight at the heart, this chain upon all the energies--was loneliness that he was entertaining, a condition of loneliness that he had never known before.
Why had he gone to see the little typewriter? ”

“ Loneliness, everlasting loneliness! Loneliness within herself: that feeling of which Jules had such a dread! Withdrawn from the world which had no charm for her, sinking away alone into emptiness! She was thirty, she was old, an old woman. Her house would be empty, her heart empty! Dreams, clouds of dreaming, which fly away, which lift like smoke, revealing only emptiness. Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness! ”

“ A sense of utter loneliness--loneliness inevitable, crushing, eternal, the loneliness of existence, encompassed by the infinite void of unconsciousness--enfolded him as a pall. Life lay like an incubus on his bosom. ”

“ Solitude, solitude! It is a lovely thing to abstract contemplation. The mind of man, not called upon to try the vast experiment, looks upon it, as upon every great endeavour, as bringing a reward with it equal to the difficulties and the impediments; but brought nearer, placed within the reach of effort, we cannot grapple with the mighty task. The feeble heart shrinks from it; the firm mind doubts and hesitates. We feel how sad and terrible it is to be alone; we learn that it is the antithesis of our nature. ”

“ Isolation is the sum-total of wretchedness to man. To be cut off, to be left solitary: to have a world alien, not your world; all a hostile camp for you; not a home at all, of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you are! ”

“ And of all kinds of isolation, inward isolation is the most appalling. The early anchorite lived with God; he dwelt in the spirit world, the most populous world of all. The miser lives in a world of imagination and fruition; his whole life and all that he is, even his sex, lies in his brain. ”

“ Women are like daws; their sympathy comes but to peck. Do you know what it is to be alone in a city? The desert is not loneliness; it is only solitude. True loneliness is to be found only in great communities. To be without a single friend or confidant, when thousand of beings move about you; to pour your sorrows into cold, unfeeling ears; to seek sympathy in blind eyes—that is loneliness. That is the loneliness that causes the heart to break."
Warrington's eyes never left hers ”

“ Several evenings past in the same manner, when the bride, mortified at such coldness, could no longer restrain herself, and said, "Why, my lord, if you disliked me, did you take me to wife? but if you love not as other men, tell me so, and I will suffer my misfortune in silence." ”

“ She feels lonely—horribly lonely in spite of all her friends. She feels like a woman alone in a great desert with no other human soul near her, thrust back upon her own thoughts, brooding over her own misery. ”

“ Then, with every tie of association shrinking from us; then, keeping the solitary vigil; then with cold, vast nature all around us, we are alone. Or, there is a solitude which oppresses us even in the heart of the great city;—a solitude more intense even than that of naked nature; when all faces are strange to us; when no pulse of sympathy throbs from our heart to the hearts of others when each passes us by, engaged with his own destiny, and leaving us to fulfil ours. ”

“ The burden upon such lives is that of isolation. Isolation may be in the midst of a crowd as well as in solitude; it is when the heart is not filled that we are truly alone. And this real solitude, this isolation of the affections from their proper objects, is something so bad, so against the law of our nature, that, broadly speaking, it is a matter not so much for endurance as for speedy getting rid of. Do you feel yourself alone and empty-hearted? Then you have necessity indeed for fortitude and brave endurance, but above all and before all you are to get out of your solitude. ”

“ All the crowds and jams of people we see are merely, for the most part, huddling together, as an unconscious compensation for the sickening loneliness they feel in their heart of hearts. We see them in amusement parks, and in all places where hordes of people congregate; and undoubtedly a part of the impulse which moves them is their unconscious solitude for which they get only consciously perceptible consolation in the sight of each other and rubbing of elbows and treading on each other’s feet. ”

“ For me loneliness never had any terror. No one could be less dependent on outward society than I was, yet I could enjoy it, only I never craved after it, nor was it necessary for my existence—I was one who have had always to stand alone. Perhaps the sharpest anguish is that which nobody knows of. I have been so unaccustomed, to sympathy that I can sit still and endure anything ”

“ It is the loneliness which men are wont to associate with death: when the Eastern ceases for this—dialogue—he has attained Heaven, absorption into the Divine. ... Oh! the loneliness! Oh! the joy of loneliness and solitude; the joy of aloofness, each for each. The Soul and God together, alone together side by side, and at last, alone and one ... one Great Soul. For our souls are carrier pigeons, homing to God. ”

“ I love solitude. I have met with people who dare not pass a moment alone; many seem to dread themselves. I find no greater happiness than to be alone out of doors, either on the sea-beach or in a wood, and there reflect. With me solitude is a necessary consolation ”

“ It is only then, when she is left alone, that she finds out the sweetness of solitude—not fruitless, but filled with memories and ideas. It is only then that she finds out herself, comes to her true self, grows strong.... ”

“ The various moods of our lives colour our souls with shades of impression, till memory in the years becomes tinged like the fiery afternoon woods in the autumn.
But loneliness is colourless, and remains as a shadow, for ever breeding strength. It is only in loneliness that a soul becomes defensive, as it is only in the silence of a great tragedy that it becomes impregnable. The growth of deep power in a mind implies a shady place aside from the surface sunlight of the day's events, a secret city in one's nature away from the noises of exterior happenings. ”

“ Now this expression of the “lonely soul” is used advisedly, because, in sad truth, every human soul is lonely. Lonely at birth,—still more lonely at death. During its progress through life it gathers around it what it can in the way of crumbs of love, grains of affection, taking them tenderly and with tears of gratefulness. But it is always conscious of solitude,—an awful yet Divine solitude over which the Infinite broods, watchful yet silent. ”

“ A person may be sorrowful without being alone, and the mind may be alone in a large assembly, in a crowded city, but not so pleasantly. I have heard that captives can solace themselves by perpetually thinking of what they loved best; but there is a danger in excess of solitude, lest our thoughts run the wrong way and ferment into eccentricity. Every right-minded person must think, and thought comes only in solitude. He must ponder upon what he is, what he has been, what he may become. The energies of the soul rise from the veiled obscurity it is placed in during its contact with the world. ”

“ When a man approaches the beginning of maturity and the fulfillment of his individual self, about the age of thirty-five, then is not his time to come to rest. On the contrary. Deeply fulfilled through marriage, and at one with his own soul, he must now undertake the responsibility for the next step into the future. He must now give himself perfectly to some further purpose, some passionate purposive activity. Till a man makes the great resolution of aloneness and singleness of being, till he takes upon himself the silence [177] and central appeasedness of maturity ”

“ To stay here alone, the one single human being, in a thousand miles of space, and not only the one human being, but the one life, with no companionship of animal, bird, or insect, that would be an experience of solitude indeed!
The idea attracted me; all day and all night to hear nothing but that thunderous roar, and see nothing but the shining sea, the gleaming ice-fields, and the glittering bergs, to be alone with Nature, to see her, as it were, intimately in her awful beauty, with breast and brow unveiled—and, perhaps, have death as one's reward! ”

“ There are times when my Loneliness is a charmed and scintillant and resourceful Loneliness with a strange and ecstatic gleam in it. The miracle of being a person rushes upon and about and into me ‘with lightning and with music.’
One loses that in a day of many friendships.
But oftener are times when the tired, tired heart and the weary, weary brain beat-beat, beat-beat to anguished torturing self-rhythms. The spirit of me closes its eyes in turbulent dusks of wondering and wishing and leans its forehead against a mathematic dead-wall. ”

“ The solitude which delighted us in youth, but which, when the thoughts that make solitude a fairy land are darkened by affliction, becomes a fearful and sombre void, resumes its old spell, as the more morbid and urgent memory of that affliction crumbles away by time. ”

“ If solitude makes us love ourselves, society gives us to others, peopling what were else a solitude. It takes us out of ourselves as from a multitude to partake of closer intimacies and satisfactions. Alone and apart, however well occupied, we lose the elasticity and dignity that come from sympathy with the aims and prospects of others. Nor has any been found equal to uninterrupted solitude. ”

“ In solitude there grows what any one brings into it- also the brute in one's nature. Thus is solitude inadvisable to many.
Has there ever been anything filthier on earth than the saints of the wilderness? ”

“ In solitude, if I escape the example of bad men, I want likewise the counsel and conversation of the good. I have been long comparing the evils with the advantages of society, and resolve to return into the world to morrow. The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout. ”

“ The real and dark danger of solitude is the self-absorption that is bound to follow. With one like myself, to whom the meeting of a new person is a kind of momentous terror, who feels forced instinctively to use all possible arts to render a clumsy presence and a heavy manner bearable, whose only hope is to be respectfully tolerated, to whom society is not an easy recreation but an arduous game, who would always sooner write a dozen letters than have an interview, with such an one the solitary life tends to make one ghost-like and evasive before one's time. ”