Quotes about Isolation

To be isolated is always to assert oneself numerically; when you assert yourself as one, that is isolation.

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.

It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.

An isolated human in a simple society is usually a dead human...

If a human being is isolated from other humans for a month or more, and is confined to a small area geographically and a small range of activities, his interest in his surroundings and its minutiae increase radically....Further, if a confined, isolated human is allowed brief contacts with other humans even without a shared language, he begins to find their presence comforting, and a pleasant relief from the "evenness" of his surroundings. If these humans controls his only sources of food as well as his sources of intraspecies stimulation, he may adapt to their demands in subtle and not so subtle ways. He may, given time, learn their language, take on their beliefs, etc.. When we catch a dolphin and put him alone in a small tank, we are imposing similar "solitary confinement" structures on him. Maybe we can thus capture his loyalty and his initiative.

The concept of the “isolated individual” is a construction of the bourgeois philosophy of individualism, and serves to conceal the social character which production always manifests.

To the extent to which a person is distanced from the settled world,

Isolation. I had nobody to tell, and no language for it anyhow. (p28)

Isolation is devastating to the human psyche.

Isolation offered its own form of companionship

I feel we are all islands-in a common sea. We are all, in the last analysis, alone. 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.

Without the unifying bond, a people becomes estranged from itself, from its past, its present and its future.

What remains is solitude.

It is a mournful thing to know that you are utterly isolated among millions of human beings; that not a drop of your blood flows in any other veins.

The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.