Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Quotes

I'm not that interested in people.

I can go days without meaningful human interaction.

Nothing echoes like an empty mailbox.

Nobody helps anybody.

If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you.

Basic human contact - the meeting of eyes, the exchanging of words - is to the psyche what oxygen is to the brain. If you're feeling abandoned by the world, interact with anyone you can.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it.

There are some people who make you feel less lonely.

For me, I value connection a lot, talking to people and connecting. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy having my own time, but I think it's really important to have that connection, so living on Mars would be a struggle for me.

We don't care if you understand us.

I just always assume no one is listening.

I wonder that you will still be talking. Nobody marks you.

An ancient father says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.

Maybe we had just gotten too used to being alone-- and maybe that needed to change.

Are you alone?" So that's what this call was about. For some reason, the question made my throat tighten. "No," I said, "Elvis is here. Would you like to talk to him?

That's what I miss, being a real human.

The trouble is not really in being alone, it's being lonely. One can be lonely in the midst of a crowd, don't you think?

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.

To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.