Quotes · Skopia

11 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Existential solitude✕clear

Autobiography and memoir · Travel writing

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

1879

★ 6.9

Novel · Modernist literature

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.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 6.1

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.

Under Western Eyes · 1911

★ 5.3

Novel · Coming of age

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?

1929

★ 5.0

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Tennessee Williams

1957

★ 4.4

Novel · Historical literature

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities · 1859

★ 4.0

Epigram · Philosophical literature

We shall die alone.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.9

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The House of Seven Gables · 1851

★ 3.6

My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

1896

★ 3.6

Personal journal

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.

1890

★ 3.5

No human being can really understand another and no one can arrange another's happiness.

1948

★ 1.9