The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Blaise Pascal1 quote
We shall die alone. — Blaise Pascal · 1662Charles Dickens1 quote
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. — Charles Dickens · 1859Graham Greene1 quote
No human being can really understand another and no one can arrange another's happiness. — Graham Greene · 1948John Muir1 quote
Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. — John Muir · 1890Joseph Conrad1 quote
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. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad. — Joseph Conrad · 1911Marcel Proust1 quote
The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. — Marcel Proust · 1922Nathaniel Hawthorne1 quote
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart!
What jailer so inexorable as one's self! — Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1851Robert Louis Stevenson1 quote
We are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world....and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1879Tennessee Williams1 quote
We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. — Tennessee Williams · 1957Thomas Wolfe1 quote
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? — Thomas Wolfe · 1929William Sharp1 quote
My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill. — William Sharp · 1896