The loathsome behaviour of City boys and hedgies at the height of their success. It was the behaviour of people without culture and without any sense of their connection to other people. They were isolated within their own phenomenally narrow set of values. Such isolation breeds stupidity because judgment is discarded as it might threaten the gamblers' groupthink. Outsiders are mocked because they 'don't understand'. - Bryan Appleyard
The intensity of a Passion is measured by the Solitude that precedes it. - Xavier Velasco
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account - Alice Walker
The fear of loneliness is like a ball and chain restraining ambition, as much of an obstacle to a full life as persecution, discrimination or poverty. Until the chain is broken, freedom, for many, will remain a nightmare - Theodore Zeldin, Intimate History of Humanity, p59
Professional aliens, aiming deliberately to be "strangers" or exiles, and making that condition a noble one. The reward they sought was internal peace -Theodore Zeldin, Intimate History of Humanity, p61
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence - George Eliot
No man is an Island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main - John Donne
Loneliness is not about being physically alone, it's about a person's individual experience of isolation and how they evaluate it - Mental Health Foundation
Loneliness is a quintessentially modern emotion. In the past, people might have been sad and alienated, but they weren?t lonely. They couldn?t survive without a lot of contact with others - Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
Loneliness engenders in us a respect for other people. It might make us feel sad, but it shares a root with compassion. Our sense of our own suffering, when lonely, makes us more attuned to the beauty and goodness of other people, and to how they too are doing what they can with their fate - Robert Rowland Smith http://theschooloflife.typepad.com/the_school_of_life/2010/05/robert-ro…