Quotes about Aloofness

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.

They seemed disconnected, hollow somehow, deeply withdrawn.

Oh, call it by some better name,
For friendship sounds too cold.

It felt ancient. Knowing. Utterly and profoundly indifferent to me.

Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.

You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain.

I have seemed cold to my friends, but it was not in my heart.

To persons whose pursuits are insulated from the common business of life—who are either in advance of mankind or apart from it—there often comes a sensation of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen solitudes around the pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer, the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but separated from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt.

was suspended in a place of no feeling,

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt, or wandering Po.

Methinks adieu
Is cold, when uttered with aught else but tears.

If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves "absent", that is more proper.

We think of these people as primitive, uneducated, crude. But bringing myself a bit closer to their lives, I felt with emotion their capacity for kindness which they radiate, because they contain it, towards any stranger. Every civilized-intelligent person, whom I have known, tends towards evil, coldness, distrust of friend. Every civilized-intelligent person, seated one step above the rest, perhaps in order to spit down on them and shout; "because I am intelligent" -with the right to everything, above everyone. I've come to the conclusion, after briefly touching these high villages without aspirations, that intelligence is not one of the human values I respect. It's inhuman. Especially since those gifted with super doses of cerebral juice can't seem to live in peace with each other. They isolate themselves and retreat from a reality they insist on showing their back. There I found men who escape all definition. Perhaps "pure" is the poor word best fitting. I feel not that "I've arrived" in a marvelous world, but that "I've left" the inclement garbage of the city. (1963)