Who knows what true loneliness is — not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Man ordinarily lives in loneliness. To avoid loneliness, he creates all kinds of relationships, friendships, organizations, political parties, religions and what not. But the basic thing is that he is very much afraid of being lonely. Loneliness is a black hole, a darkness, a frightening negative state almost like death … as if you are being swallowed by death itself. To avoid it, you run out and fall into anybody, just to hold somebody’s hand, to feel that you are not lonely… Nothing hurts more than loneliness.
But the trouble is, any relationship that arises out of the fear of being lonely is not going to be a blissful experience, because the other is also joining you out of fear. You both call it love. You are both deceiving yourself and the other. It is simply fear, and fear can never be the source of love. Only those who love are absolutely fearless; only those who love are able to be alone, joyously, whose need for the other has disappeared, who are sufficient unto themselves…

The day you decide that all these efforts are failures, that your loneliness has remained untouched by all your efforts, that is a great moment of understanding. Then only one thing remains: to see whether loneliness is such a thing that you should be afraid of, or if it is just your nature. Then rather than running out and away, you close your eyes and go in. Suddenly the night is over, and a new dawn … The loneliness transforms into aloneness.

Aloneness is your nature. You were born alone, you will die alone. And you are living alone without understanding it, without being fully aware of it. You misunderstand aloneness as loneliness; it is simply a misunderstanding. You are sufficient unto yourself.

Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude, and even at times are very frightened at the prospect of being alone. Many people suffer from “the fear of finding oneself alone,” remarks André Gide, “and so they don’t find themselves at all.

There is a big black hat and it makes you invisible. Have you heard of that hat? You put it on and then no one can see you.

There must be different kinds of loneliness, or at least different degrees of loneliness, but the most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few. I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive. It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.

I think that many people hide their identity, tolerate restrictions, and remain in bad relationships because they're afraid of being lonely. But I wonder what they mean by 'lonely.' Aren't they very lonely when they deal with people who don't understand and appreciate them? I know I'd be lonely in such a situation.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

Loneliness is emptiness; and moral nature has as much horror of it as physical nature. Solitude is habitable only for the man of genius who fills it with his ideas — daughters of the spiritual world — or for the beholder of divine works who finds it illuminated by the day of heaven, animated by the breath and by the voice of God. Save these two men, so close to paradise, loneliness is to torture what morale is to physique. Between loneliness and torture there is all the difference between nervous illness and surgical illness. It is suffering multiplied by infinity. The body touches infinity through the nervous system, just as the mind enters it through thought.

Who knows what true happiness is, not the conventional word.. but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, that wears a mask, the most miserable outcast hugs some memory.. or some illusion.

"We fear loneliness, Annie, but loneliness itself does not exist. It has no form. It is merely a shadow that falls over us. And just as shadows die when light changes, the sadness can depart once we see the truth."

"What's the truth?" Annie asked.

"That the end of loneliness is when someone needs you." The old woman smiled. "And the world is so full of need."

i am invisible understand, simply because people refuse to see me

We incline towards feelings of isolation and persecution because we have an unrealistic sense of how much difficulty is normal. We panic too easily, as we misjudge the meaning of our troubles. We are lonely – not that we have no one to talk to, but because those around us can’t appreciate our travails with sufficient depth, honesty and patience. This is partly because the ways we show the pain of our choppy relationships, envy or unfulfilled ambitions can easily seem pejorative and insulting. We suffer and we feel that this suffering lacks dignity

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

Why do you hate the idea of being with yourself so much that ‘the time you spend with yourself is now considered as loneliness

Why we fear loneliness. The fear of loneliness was injected into our minds since we were kids. We have learned that the kid who eats alone, sits alone, and has no friends is pathetic. In every book or movie, the kid who is eating alone, and has no friend is always featured as a weak character who needs to be saved.

It’s not pathetic to be alone. I realized that we don’t hate being alone. We hate to believe that we are left behind.

Being alone is a part of life. But being lonely means viewing yourself from the lens of sympathy and misery. When you look at yourself through the lens of loneliness, you feel insecure and left out.

Being alone doesn’t mean you are lonely. Being alone means YOU ARE WITH YOURSELF.

Stop romanticizing your life , one day someone will come to save you, rescue you, or rather fall in love with you. The problem with this is that you CHOOSE to believe that YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH to change your life all by yourself. You rely your hope on someone who doesn’t exist.

After college, you don’t make friends. You just network. You just try to be nice to people so you are not left behind (mostly).

We don’t want people to think that no one chose us so what do we do? We start becoming like an ideal version of whom everyone loves. We start saying YES to things that we hate. But step by step, as we become like everyone else, we go far away from who we truly are.

Loneliness is not when you don’t have people around. Loneliness occurs when you cannot find yourself inside you. The moment you feel the loss of your real self, that’s when loneliness makes a home inside you.

“There are some days when you miss yourself more than you have ever missed anyone else.

Solitude is my home , Loneliness was my cage.

Imagine Yourself as a computer and see how you have opened different tabs of your personality for each person you meet. New person,