Difference Between Alone And Lonely Quotes

There's a big difference between being alone and being lonely. And I'm guessing that once you've discovered this distinction you can't go back to solitary confinement without serious emotional repercussions.

What I learned The well-documented difference Between alone and lonely The comfort of knowing

I know the difference between alone and lonely,

It's because I haven't courage,' said Samuel. 'I could never quite take the responsibility. When the Lord God did not call my name, I might have called his name - but I did not. There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity. It's not an uncommon disease. But it's nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.' 'I'd think there are degrees of greatness,' Adam said. 'I don't think so,' said Samuel. 'That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other - cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I'm glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other? None of my children will be great either, except perhaps Tom. He's suffering over the choosing right now. It's a painful thing to watch. And somewhere in me I want him to say yes. Isn't that strange? A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be.

When you learn how to be alone you’ll discover the difference between alone and lonely.

I have always known there is a difference between loneliness and aloneness. I am alone, but my father is lonely. And if I had to choose one, I would rather be alone.

The fact is, there's a difference between being alone and being lonely; I may not of been completely alone in life, but I was definitely lonely.

I was having an epiphany. A moment of supreme clarity, leading to what I dubbed a “realization of solitude” that goes like this: I’m lonely. But when I left that girl in the window I was sure I’d never felt more godforsaken in my life. There’s a big difference between being alone and being lonely. And I’m guessing that once you’ve discovered this distinction you can’t go back to solitary confinement without serious emotional repercussions.

The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.

I think there is a difference between aloneness and loneliness. Aloneness is necessary for the soul to thrive - even to come alive. Not loneliness.

there is a difference between loneliness and solitude, one will empty you and one will fill you. you have the power to choose.

there is a difference between loneliness and solitude, one will empty you and one will fill you. you have the power to choose.

The life of the party is actually an introverted recluse. She knows the difference between being alone and being lonely. The latter is a feeling she has yet to experience. If she invites you into her world, she plans on keeping you.

There is a tremendous difference between alone and lonely. You could be lonely in a group of people. I like being alone. I like eating by myself. I go home at night and just watch a movie or hang out with my dog. I have to exert myself and really say, oh God, I’ve got to see my friends because I’m too content with myself.

I’ve learned that there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely.

The difference between most people and myself is that for me the "dividing walls" are transparent. That is my peculiarity. Others find these walls so opaque that they see nothing behind them and therefore think nothing is there. To some extent I perceive the processes going on in the background, and that gives me an inner certainty. People who see nothing have no certainties and can draw no conclusions--or do not trust them even if they do. I do not know what started me off perceiving the stream of life. Probably the unconscious itself. Or perhaps my early dreams. They determined my course from the beginning. Knowledge of processes in the background early shaped my relationship to the world. Basically, that relationship was the same in my childhood as it is to this day. As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am stilI, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. The loneliness began with the experiences of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was working on the unconscious. If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.

The notion that I had the power to outgrow who I was, and start a new relationship with who I wanted to be, became clear to me when I was about twenty-one. Even though it felt impossible, I wanted badly to reroute my life and find joy, but I didn't know where to start. Searching for and finding my how was the scariest thing I'd done in my life. Changing meant I had to start with being honest about who I was and who I wanted to be. It meant learning the difference between being alone and being lonely. I had to get my stuff together. And in order to do that, I knew I needed to leave people behind who were distracting me from my growth. I had to start from scratch and acknowledge my roles in the cycles that I said I wanted to break. Committing to change meant challenges and trust, which stripped me of everything that I knew.

YOU FIRST When entering into relationships, we have a tendency to bend. We bend closer to one another, because regardless of what type of relationship it might be — romantic, business, friendship — there’s a reason you’re bringing that other person into your life, and that means the load is easier to carry if you carry it together, both bending toward the center. I picture people in relationships as two trees, leaning toward one another. Over time, as the relationship solidifies, you both become more comfortable bending, and as such bend farther, eventually resting trunk to trunk. You support each other and are stronger because of the shared strength of your root system and entwined branches. Double-tree power! But there’s a flaw in this mode of operation. Once you’ve spent some time leaning on someone else, if they disappear — because of a breakup, a business upset, a death, a move, an argument — you’re all that’s left, and far weaker than when you started. You’re a tree leaning sideways; the second foundation that once supported you is…gone. This is a big part of why the ending of particularly strong relationships can be so disruptive. When your support system presupposes two trunks — two people bearing the load, and divvying up the responsibilities; coping with the strong winds and hailstorms of life — it can be shocking and uncomfortable and incredibly difficult to function as an individual again; to be just a solitary tree, alone in the world, dealing with it all on your own. A lone tree needn’t be lonely, though. It’s most ideal, in fact, to grow tall and strong, straight up, with many branches. The strength of your trunk — your character, your professional life, your health, your sense of self — will help you cope with anything the world can throw at you, while your branches — your myriad interests, relationships, and experiences — will allow you to reach out to other trees who are likewise growing up toward the sky, rather than leaning and becoming co-dependent. Relationships of this sort, between two equally strong, independent people, tend to outlast even the most intertwined co-dependencies. Why? Because neither person worries that their world will collapse if the other disappears. It’s a relationship based on the connections between two people, not co-dependence. Being a strong individual first alleviates a great deal of jealousy, suspicion, and our innate desire to capture or cage someone else for our own benefit. Rather than worrying that our lives will end if that other person disappears, we know that they’re in our lives because they want to be; their lives won’t end if we’re not there, either. Two trees growing tall and strong, their branches intertwined, is a far sturdier image than two trees bent and twisted, tying themselves into uncomfortable knots to wrap around one another, desperately trying to prevent the other from leaving. You can choose which type of tree to be, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with either model; we all have different wants, needs, and priorities. But if you’re aiming for sturdier, more resilient relationships, it’s a safe bet that you’ll have better options and less drama if you focus on yourself and your own growth, first. Then reach out and connect with others who are doing the same.

(The very next day) 'I am enduring will standing alone bare and yes, I am completely naked to the world outside. So, unprotected by the atmosphere above and around me, so unlike- the day, I was born into this hellish world.' 'My life was not always like this! Still as of now, I stand trembling on top of this cruel land, which I call my hereditary land or my home-town.' 'Some still call me by my name, and that is 'Nevaeh May Natalie.' 'Some of the others, like the kids I go to school within this land, have other titles for me.' 'However, you can identify me by the name of 'Nevaeh.' That is if you want to.' 'I do not think that even matters to you, my name is… it has been replaced and it is not significant anymore. Nor does my name matter to anyone out there for miles around. At least that is the way it seems to me, standing here now as I see the bus come to take me there.' 'Names or not said to me, 'I feel alone!' I whispered to myself.' 'It is like I am living a dream. I didn't think my nightmare of orgasmic, tragic, and drizzling emotions pouring in my mind would last this long.' ('Class, faces, names, done.') 'It like a thunderstorm pounding in my brain, as it is today outside. I have come home from yet another day of hell that would be called- school to you.' 'I don't even go into the house until I have this restricting schoolgirl uniform torn off my body. I feel like my skin is crawling with bugs when it is on my figure.' (Outside in the fields, next to the tracks) 'It's the middle- September and I am standing in the rain. It is so cold, so lonely, and so loveless! Additionally, this is not usual for me, I am always bare around my house, I have my reason you'll see.' 'The rain has been falling on me like knives ever since the moment, I got off the yellow bus.' 'A thunderbolt clattered, more resonant than anything ever heard previously.' 'All the rain is matting my long brown hair on me as it lies on my backside longer than most girls. Yet I am okay with that at last, I am free.' (I have freedom) 'To a point! I still feel so trapped by all of them.' 'Ten or twenty minutes have now passed; I am still in the same very spot. Just letting water follow me down. I'm drenched!' 'I can feel the wetness as it lingers in my hair for a while, so unforgivably soaking my body even more as if sinking within me washing me clean.' 'Counting my sanctions, I feel satisfied in a way when I do feel it dropping offends my hair, as if 'God' is still in control of my life, even if I was sent to and damned to hell.' 'Like it is wiping away everything that happened to me today, away from the day of the past too.' 'The wetness is still running down the small of my back thirty minutes must have passed, and it is like my mind is off.' 'Currently, it follows the center point on my back. Then down in-between my petite butt cheeks. Water and bloodstream off my butt to the ground near the heels of my feet. I can feel as if that part of me is washed clean from the day that I had to go through.' 'Some of this shower is cascading off my little face, and it slowly collects on my little boobs, where it beads up and separates into two different watercourses down to my belly button.' 'I eyeball this, as it goes all the way down the front of me. It trickles down on me, to where it turns the color of light pink off my 'Girly Parts.' As they would never be the same.

No. My situation is not the same at all. It’s like the difference between being alone and being lonely. Two separate, distinct things.

There’s a difference between lonely and alone.

My entire body vibrated with the sudden knowledge that not only was he dead…he was gone. There is a big difference between being lonely and being alone. Alone is something you choose to be. Lonely is not.

In the middle of the night: Remember: initially your puppy’s crate is ideally going to be located in your bedroom. So, you’ll hear them when they whine. And you will hear whining, especially during the first few nights when they are lonely and missing their littermates. But they’ll also whine because they have to go to the bathroom and are stressed out about peeing inside the crate where they sleep. Admittedly, at first it’s very difficult to know the difference between lonely whining and potty whining. When you hear whining, wait. If the crate is next to your bed, you can put your hand down next to the crate, so your puppy knows they are not alone. But don’t talk to them. If they calm down, stop whining, and go back to bed, they were just lonely. But if they don’t calm down and continue to whine, or the whining increases, err on the side of caution. Assume they have to pee and take them out of the crate to their designated area. Keep it businesslike—no playful interactions. It should just take a couple of minutes, then they go back in their crate and you go back to bed. If it’s taking more than a couple of minutes, your puppy just wanted your attention, so head back inside and put your puppy in their crate and you in your bed.

They had a connection, a path that lay open between them, and she felt his loneliness. She'd always been alone, and she'd accepted her path. Absinthe was different. He'd been with his family, those 17 people who still surround him and yet he was desperately lonely. Why?

As sometimes happened following a visit to Kent, the city had a chill to it that went beyond a sense of the air outside. Though Maisie loved her flat in Pimlico, there was a warmth to her father's cottage, to being at Chelstone, that made her feel cocooned and safe. And she felt wanted. That flat was hers to do with as she wished, and to do exactly as she pleased within those walls, but sometimes she felt it still held within it the stark just-moved-in feeling that signaled the difference between a house and a home. Of course, it still was not fully furnished, and there were no ornaments displayed - a vase, perhaps, that a visitor might comment upon and the hostess would say, "Oh, that was a gift, let me tell you about it..." There were no stories attached to the flat - but how could there be, when she was always alone in her home. There were no family photographs, no small framed portraits on the mantelpiece over the fire in the sitting room as there were at her father's house. She thought the flat would be all the better for some photographs, not only to serve as reminders of those who were loved, or reflections of happy times spent in company, but to act as mirrors, where she might see the affection with which she was held by those dear to her. A mirror in which she could see her connections. ... Most of the time, thought, she was not lonely, just on her own, an unmarried woman of independent means, even when the extent of the means - or lack thereof - sometimes gave her cause to remain awake at night. She knew the worries that came to the fore at night were the ones you had to pay attention to, for they blurred reasoned thought, sucked clarity from any consideration of one's situation, and could lead a mind around in circles, leaving one drained and ill-tempered. And if there was no one close with whom to discuss those concerns, they grew in importance in the imagination, whether were rooted in good sense or not. ... She wondered if one could take leave of one's senses, even if one had no previous occasions of mental incapacity, simply by being isolated from others. Is that what pushed the man over the edge of all measured thought? Were his thoughts so distilled, without the calibrating effect of a normal life led among others, that he ceased to recognize the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil, or between having a voice and losing it? And if that were so, might an ordinary woman living alone with her memories, with her work, with the walls of her flat drawing in upon her, be at some risk of not seeing the world as it is?

And you know, there is a huge difference between being lonely and alone. Both serve a purpose. When you’re alone, you can listen to what your heart really has to say without other people’s opinions getting in the way. You just have to be strong enough to live your truth after you hear it. And you can be in a room full of people and still be lonely.

Most of the associations between the living things we know about are essentially cooperative ones, symbiotic in one degree or another; when they have the look of adversaries, it is usually a standoff relation, with one party issuing signals, warnings, flagging the other off. It takes long intimacy, long and familiar interliving, before one kind of creature can cause illness in another. If there were to be life on the moon, it would have a lonely time waiting for acceptance to membership here. We do not have solitary beings. Every creature is, in some sense, connected to and dependent on the rest. It has been estimated that we probably have real knowledge of only a small proportion of the microbes of the earth, because most of them cannot be cultivated alone. They live together in dense, interdependent communities, feeding and supporting the environment for each other, regulating the balance of populations between different species by a complex system of chemical signals. With our present technology, we can no more isolate one from the rest, and rear it alone, than we can keep a single bee from drying up like a desquamated cell when removed from his hive. The bacteria are beginning to have the aspect of social animals; they should provide nice models for the study of interactions between forms of life at all levels. They live by collaboration, accommodation, exchange, and barter.

I wonder sometimes if the price of my heightened resistance to loneliness might be higher than I realize. I’m in the phase of life when there are a lot of weddings, a lot of first babies, when, to many, the absence of those things appears troublesome, even pitiable. People like to say you have to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone else, but that doesn’t seem true. I know plenty of people who hated being alone and whose happiness in finding a partner was magnified by relief. Their dislike, sometimes even horror, of being alone primed them for love, motivated them to commit. But if you’re actually happy alone, if you’ve accomplished that mythical prerequisite for love, you will probably also have rendered love less necessary, made yourself less amenable to accommodating someone’s needs and schedule and foibles. You run the risk of becoming set in your ways, of being unable not to feel smothered. An acupuncturist, feeling my pulse, said he could tell I was an armored person. I asked my mom later if she thought I was armored, and she laughed like, duh. Would I be able to tell the difference between contentment and armor? It seems like one should be light and the other heavy, but you can get used to weight, not even notice it after a while.

There is a difference between lonely and alone," I said. "Sometimes, you can get loney in a room full of people.

For me, this was the first hint that the liturgy might be the cure for spiritual loneliness. Though I felt inadequate and alone during my prayer crisis, I was not alone. Much of American spiritual life trudges through the muck of solitary spirituality. Twenty years ago, Robert Bellah described this phenomenon in Habits of the Heart, with his now famous description of one woman: Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” This suggests the logical possibility of more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us. “I believe in God,” Sheila says. “I am not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” “My little voice” guides many lonely people to and through New Age, wicca, Buddhism, labyrinths, Scientology, yoga, meditation, and various fads in Christianity—and then creates a new Sheilaism from the fragments that have not been discarded along the way. I love Sheila Larson precisely because she articulates nearly perfectly my lifelong struggle: “I believe in God. I am not a religious fanatic…. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilism. Just my own little voice.” The difference between Sheila and me is that she has the courage of her convictions: she knows her faith is very personal and so hasn’t bothered with the church. I like to pretend that my faith is grounded in community, but I struggle to believe in anything but Markism. Fortunately God loves us so much he has made it a “spiritual law” that Sheilism or Markism become boring after awhile. The gift of the liturgy—and it is precisely why I need the liturgy—is that it helps me hear not so much “my little voice” but instead the still, small voice (Psalm 46). It leads away from the self and points me toward the community of God.

Grabbing the bowl with both hands, I stepped right up behind him, reached my arms up high, and tipped it over. The sense of glee I got as I watched his entire body stiffen and all that batter fall onto his head was kind of alarming. No wonder he’d been so proud of his suction-cup hickey. I was damn proud of this mess. When only a little dribble was falling from the bowl, I brought the bowl away from his head, set it on the counter, and had only taken two steps when he grabbed me around my waist and hauled me back to him. The movement made him lose his footing on the now-slippery tile and we both crashed down to the floor. Quickly getting up on my hands and knees, I slip-crawled a few feet before my legs went out and I fell back to the floor. Kash dragged me back by my legs and I was laughing so hard I couldn’t even attempt to try to crawl away as he flipped me over on my back and slipped toward me until he was covering my body. I laughed harder and wiped at his cheek, which was completely covered. “You, uh, got a little something there.” His eyes were silver as he growled, “Now do you feel better?” “Much!” “I probably deserved that.” “A little bit.” My laughter finally quieted and I smiled widely at him. “Rachel . . .” His voice dropped and the huskiness alone caused my breathing to deepen. When I realized that our bodies were flush, mine started warming again, and my eyelids fluttered shut when he brought one hand up to cup my cheek. When he repeated my name, I could feel his breath against my lips and they parted in anticipation. His hand left my cheek and he leaned closer to whisper in my ear, “Your hickey looks really lonely.” Wait. What?! My eyes flew open just as he wiped a hand covered in batter across my face. “You son of a bitch!” Kash laughed loudly and attempted to move some of the batter so it wasn’t in my eyes. “I will end you,” I said, making him laugh harder. “I hate you.” “Don’t lie, Sour Patch, you love me.” He was joking, I knew he was joking—but my heart still took off at his assumption. Kash must have noticed the change somehow, because he immediately stopped laughing and his gray eyes turned silver. “Rachel?” “I, uh—we should clean this up.” I attempted to slide out from under him, but he kept his weight on me and brought his hand up to my cheek again. I stopped moving beneath him and locked up my body as his gaze held mine. His silver eyes fell over my face as his head inched down, and in the torturous seconds where his lips hovered over mine again, I told myself a dozen times I needed to push him away. But needing and wanting are two completely different things. Kash closed the distance between us and pressed his lips to mine, and in that instant, I felt like I was exactly where I belonged and my body relaxed between him and the tile floor.

I am not against being strong, but who says you can’t talk or share and still be strong? The truly strong man not only knows when to ask but also how to ask for help. Of course, like all men, I don’t feel comfortable telling people everything about me. There are just some things you want to keep to yourself. There are some things you should keep to yourself. Besides, sometimes it depends on who is listening. But there is a difference between positive and negative silence. There is much to be said for the solitude of thought. There is much to be said for knowing when to keep your mouth shut. You can be alone with your thoughts, but you need not be a lonely man.

There is a difference between being alone, being lonely, and being by yourself. I came to understand that I am never alone and not lonely, but I am definitely by myself.