Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

When I think about popular culture, I can't help but think that we're living in the age of loneliness. There's this illusion that we all have instant access to each other, but we actually have no real connection.

Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.

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

I still think that the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one... That is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.

The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches--enduring loneliness.

I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime; honours shower upon me from every side; artists pay me compliments on my work; there are many people to whom my position must seem enviable ... But I don't seem to have a single real friend!

There's no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it.

I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider.

We expect more from technology and less from each other. We create technology to provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

He didn't want Lucy to grow up feeling alone, surrounded by everything and having nothing.

The worst thing someone gets is isolated. Isolation is the darkest part of any condition.

Seniors love getting junk mail. It's sometimes their only way of communicating or feeling like they're part of the real world.

I'm surrounded by people and feel alone.

Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. [Speaking of self-posed isolation in old age.]

Fame invades your private life. It takes away from the time that you spend with friends, and the time that you can work. It tends to isolate you from the real world.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.

The reason for my starting a diary is that I have no real friend.

Loneliness is the most compelling force in the universe.

When he talked to you, you seemed to fit in, but when someone else was talking, or he would be distracted, you jsut looked lonely over there. At least to me. But whenever I would tell you that, you'd say "I'm fine. I just slip out of it, you know?" And I'd say "I'll catch you," and you would say, "It's not the kind of slipping you can catch.

I think that social networking makes people more connected, yet more distant, so there are people with less ties to real friend groups and less a sense of self.

Nobody ever lies about being lonely.

Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.

Social media puts us inside our phones and our computers and our headphones, and we're not connecting so much with our outside environment. Even when people go to the Grand Canyon they're more concerned about the selfies than actually looking at the canyon. I see it with my own kids - the addiction to needing things fast, never pausing to just see what's around us and connect with our fellow human beings in real time.

it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody