“And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.”
Book of Genesis, c. 600 BC · opening book of the Hebrew Bible
Chapter 5
On Loneliness
“Two are better than one. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth.”
Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC · Hebrew book of the Preacher
“God setteth the solitary in families.”
Book of Psalms, c. 500 BC · Hebrew songbook
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
John Donne, 1624 · English poet and dean of St Paul's, writing from his sickbed
“A person is a person through other people.”
Nguni proverb, 1900 · Zulu and Xhosa saying that names the ubuntu philosophy
“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Charlotte Brontë, 1847 · English novelist, in the voice of Jane Eyre
“We must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.”
Michel de Montaigne, 1580 · French essayist of Périgord
“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
Henry David Thoreau, 1854 · American naturalist at Walden Pond
“There is a solitude of space, a solitude of sea, a solitude of death, but these society shall be compared with that profounder site, that polar privacy, a soul admitted to itself.”
Emily Dickinson, 1870 · American poet of Amherst
Across 148 studies of more than 300,000 people, strong social relationships were linked to a fifty percent greater likelihood of surviving the follow up period.
Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, 2010 · researchers who measured social ties against mortality
Eight decades of following the same lives found that the warmth of close relationships, more than money or fame, predicted who stayed healthy and content.
Harvard Study of Adult Development, 2015 · longitudinal study begun in 1938, directed by Robert Waldinger
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