I always felt an outsider.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

I’ve never gotten thick skin. If you close yourself off and you get this protective armor, there is a price you pay with that – of not feeling. And feeling is important when you are a songwriter.

One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

You know I vowed when I became President not to talk about the loneliest toughest job in the world and I didn’t.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

Those movies sure got me into a rut.

There are a lot of groups that feel a little bit strange around me, because I am inclusive.

I don’t like being alone.

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

I’d like to be the last person alive in the world! Yes, I’d like to know what happens.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

The truth is: Belonging starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you’re enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect.

I’ve felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father’s family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realise is that you’re not alone.

It’s often just enough to be with someone. I don’t need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You’re not alone.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

I am in the world feeling my way to light ‚amid the encircling gloom.‘

It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

It is better to be alone than in bad company.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

World belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader or that king or prince or religious leader. World belongs to humanity.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I won’t belong to any organization that would have me as a member.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.

When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‚I never want to be alone.‘ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

Too much self-centered attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

My friends, there are no friends.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

Israel is following policies which maximise its security threats… policies which choose expansion over security… policies which lead to their moral degradation, their isolation, their delegitimation, as they call it now, and very likely ultimate destruction. That’s not impossible.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

I don’t think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It’s lonely out here.