Human Solitude Quotes

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness.

Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion.

Human beings are born solitary, but everywhere they are in chains - daisy chains - of interactivity. Social actions are makeshift forms, often courageous, sometimes ridiculous, always strange. And in a way, every social action is a negotiation, a compromise between 'his,' 'her' or 'their' wish and yours.

No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

It is not good that man should be alone. ... Hitherto all things that have been named, were approved of God to be very good: loneliness is the first thing which God's eye named not good: whether it be a thing, or the want of something, I labour not.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!