Henri Nouwen Quotes

People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger.

All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone.

If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in poor company.

No one really wants to admit they are lonely, and it is never really addressed very much between friends and family. But I have felt lonely many times in my life.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

People think being alone is a luxury, but it's crucial: Whatever you're not down with about yourself gets loud and in your face.

Solitude, seeming a sanctuary, proves a grave; a sepulchre in which the living lie, where all good qualities grow sick and die

Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.

He has learned that God uses solitude to teach us how to live with other people.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.

The kind of solitude that refreshes and restores is very important, not just for children, not just for adolescents, but for all of us. If you don't teach your children how to be alone they will only be able to be lonely.

Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood.

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon." Lisa Simpson

Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves

It may be laid down as a position which seldom deceives, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong.

Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

I feel like the vast majority of the world's problems would disappear if suddenly everyone on the planet were relatively self-aware and capable of honest self-love and compassion.

One of the things that is devastating is I realise I haven't been living a different life than when I was, like, 12. I'm shocked at how reclusive I've been since then. I was unaware of it until recently.

I have a tendency to go through my life at full speed and as a one-man band, and so I don't generally stop and take in other people enough to develop many relationships. I'm starting to regret that a bit. I want to change it.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

There's a balance in my life. There's reality, and there's the part that looks really glamorous, but we're all just people in the end.

There are times in my life when I haven't been happy. Sometimes it's not even physical, it's something else. The key is identifying why you're unhappy and doing whatever you can to fix it in a healthy way.