Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

Honestly, humans are social creatures that really crave intimacy, and I think that the friends I have who are trying to somehow go it alone are suffering for it.

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.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

Here is the infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.

Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people.

Everybody needs somebody sometimes.

A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.

Sometimes a woman needs a man for company, no matter how useless he is.

Strangers are an endangered species.

No one can be happy in eternal solitude.

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.

Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.

No one can live without friendship, because what would you do all day without friends?

loneliness has its own needs!

We say, 'Shall we meet for a drink?', as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another.[...]We say, 'Would you like to come for some coffee?', as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people.

To a heart formed for friendship and affection the charms of solitude are very short-lived.

I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.

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.

But a man needs company.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.

In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.

If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.

We're social animals; we're meant to be together, but we were never necessarily meant to be together without being together. That was never the plan, I don't think.