Isolation leads to psychopathology. Isolated from the rest of nature, isolated from each other by walls of fear, isolated from our own bodies, and isolated most of all from our own horrifying experience, is it any wonder that we are all crazy?

Something in our nature cries out to be loved by another. Isolation is devastating to the human psyche. That is why solitary confinement is considered the cruelest of punishments.

Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance.

Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.

for humans, no matter what the warmth and duration of human contact and what the size of the group, a periodic sense of isolation is inescapable; it is no less than the human condition.

Isolation is the worst possible counselor.

ISOLATION DOES STRANGE THINGS to a person’s mind. This is true for any social creature, human or otherwise. Monkeys taken from their mothers at birth, placed alone in stainless-steel chambers, and deprived of contact with other animals (“human and subhuman” alike, according to the researchers), develop irreversible mental illnesses. As one of the experts in this field, Harry Harlow, put it: “sufficiently severe and enduring social isolation reduces these animals to a social-emotional level in which the primary social responsiveness is fear.

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.

Perhaps the most destructive aspect of alienation is that: the loss of power, of control over one’s destiny, over one’s memories, thoughts, relationships, past, and future. For in a world where no normative understandings apply, where one is perceived as futile and unwanted, where one’s perceptions are denied by acquaintance and stranger alike, where pain is the single most familiar sensation, the loss of self is experienced continually and, finally, desperately.

...to have anything full strength (especially something which outlives itself) is to insure increasing isolation; and isolation is an outrage to the emotions and a bewilderment to the soul.

It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason.

The effects of 6 months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.

Even as a kid, I felt isolated. Isolation makes you sensitive. As a kid, I felt I was the only person who was like that. But there's a good side to isolation. It makes you sensitive, and sensitivity is part of the creative process.

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