Diogenes Quotes

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

I think people don't want be alone. Ultimately, we want to feel connected. We want to feel like there is someone who actually sees us in the world. That's the big thing: to be seen. How many people actually feel seen?

You can be surrounded by many people but still feel quite lonely if you don't have strong connections and if you feel you can't be yourself with them. Conversely, you can just be around a few people, but feel deeply connected to them.

A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.

I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

You know, the man's best friend is his dog... if he's got nothing else.

Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn't that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.

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

I do not concern myself with my inability to feel such comfort amidst humans (other than with very few friends and family), but, rather, am simply thankful that at least dogs exist, and I’m humbly aware of how much less a person I’d be – how less a human – if they did not exist.

A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.

If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.

Everybody needs somebody sometimes.

If I had a dog I would not feel so lonely, but I suppose that is asking for too much.

Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

A man needed somebody. There wasn't anybody around, so you had to make up somebody, make him up to be like a man should be. It wasn't make-believe or cheating. The other way was make-believe and cheating: living your life without a man like him around.

It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog than to any human being.

To be without sympathy is to be alone in the world--without friends or country, home or kindred.

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.

Physician Albert Scheweitzer said. " We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness." Professor Leo Buscaglia notes, "There seems to be accumulating evidence that there is actually an inborn need for this togetherness, this human interaction, this love. It seems that without these close ties with other human beings, a new born infant, for example, can regress developmentally, lose consciousness, fall into idiocy and die.

One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness. I mean it's one of the things that goes way back; loneliness is not good for the world. And so, whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural, and healthy to want somebody to go through life with. It's central to our humanity.

I can tell how lonely I am by how easily I'm fooled by a mannequin in a store.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?

No one can be happy in eternal solitude.

I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.