Quotes about Isolation

It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp... Beauty is the word that shall be our first.

In Tanzania, the chimps are isolated in a very tiny patch of forest. I flew over it 13 years ago and realized that, basically, all the trees had gone, that people all around the park are struggling to survive. It became very clear that there was no way to protect the chimps while the people were in this dire circumstance.

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us—including ourselves.

Like dropping through a hole in everything that the world said was important….Like discovering that nothing else mattered and all I needed was now….Temporarily removed from the game….Like floating weightless on the Dead Sea and looking up at an empty sky.

I wish more of us could understand that our increasing isolation, no matter how much it seems to express pride and self-affirmation, is not the answer to our problems. Rather, the answer is a revival of our ancient commitment to God, who rules over all the peoples of the world and exalts no one over any other, and to the moral and spiritual values which were once legendary in America. We must reach out our hand in friendship both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.

In winter when the snow and ice were fierce, we shook beneath our different roofs alone, and that's what Hell is like, I think. It's cold and shame and shaking. And worst of all, it's loneliness.

Virginity among pagans meant a bodily condition, a physical intactness, a preserved isolation, to which there was nothing corresponding in the man. Hence pagans never glorified the virgin man, but only the virgin maid. But with Christianity, virginity ceased to mean physical intactness but unity. It meant not separation but relationship, not the will of another person alone, but also the will of God.

Here is the answer to the riddle of love. Love implies relation. If lived in isolation, it becomes selfishness; if absorbed in collectivity, it loses its personality and, therefore, the right to love.

To be devoid of love is the essence of hell.