I always felt an outsider.

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.

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

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 don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

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

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 don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

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

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that’s when I think life is over.

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

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.

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.

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.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

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

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

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

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.

It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer’s you are an old fart. That’s how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.

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?

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.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

If you want special results, you have to feel special things and do special things together. You can speak about spirit, or you can live it.

It’s the journey of self, I guess. You start with this kind of loner, outside guy, which a lot of people can relate to, and he goes out into the world.

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

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

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

Nobody knows me.

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 have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

Gee, its lonesome in the outfield. It’s hard to keep awake with nothing to do.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

When the people you love are gone, you’re alone.

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 have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

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

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid and neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

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

I am alone; I am always alone no matter what.

I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

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

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.

There is something in the way that we are now, with our cell phones, and people are not looking at each other and not being in the moment with each other, that kids feel isolated.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.