Loneliness is an emotional state in which a person experiences a powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation, of being cut off, disconnected from, and alienated towards other people. The lonely person may find it difficult or even impossible to have any form of meaningful human contact. The first recorded use of the word "lonely" was in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus.

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• Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, cars, sidewalks, stores. Everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man.
  • Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

• Well I'm the only one here.
  • Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

• They're sharing a drink they call loneliness
  But it's better than drinking alone.
  • Billy Joel, "Piano Man", Piano Man (1973)

• Life is very long when you're lonely.
  • Morrissey, in "The Queen Is Dead", from the album of the same name by The Smiths (1986)

• All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
  • The Beatles, "Eleanor Rigby"

• Loneliness / Got a mind of its own / The more people around / The more you feel alone
  • Bob Dylan, "Marchin' to the City", The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs

• We suffer a lot in our society from loneliness. So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.
  • American Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho: The Way it is

• It's not that I hate people, I just feel better when they're not around.
  • Henry Chinaski in Bar Fly

• Loneliness is this world's worst kind of pain.
  • Gaara in Naruto

• That is when I realized that in all of the world no one needed me. I was alone.
• Can you understand? Not having a dream... not being needed by anyone... The pain of merely being alive.
  • Haku in Naruto

• Insults have broken my heart and left me weak, I looked for sympathy but there was none; I found no one to comfort me.
  • Psalm 69:20

• Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.'
  • Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude

• Who knows what true happiness is? Not the conventional word but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
  • Joseph Conrad in Under Western Eyes

• I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
  • T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.
  • James Joyce in Dubliners

Unsourced

• Loneliness is a barrier that prevents one from uniting with the inner self.
  • Carl Rogers

• Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
  • Mother Teresa

• Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space.
  • White Oleander by Janet Fitch

• At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self.
  • Brendan Francis

• You are never so lonely as when you are in a crowd.
  • Unknown

• We are always in our own company.
  • Proverb

• When so many are lonely… as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
  • Tennessee Williams