“When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets -- we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”

—  Thomas Wolfe

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greates…" by Thomas Wolfe?
Thomas Wolfe photo
Thomas Wolfe 51
American writer 1900–1938

Related quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Carole King photo
George Herbert Mead photo
Dennis Prager photo
Benjamin Creme photo

“As we think. Moment to moment, as we act... we set into motion causes. Effects stemming from these causes make our lives for good or for ill... individually and socially and globally. So whatever we think has to be harmless.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: The State of the World 2010, public lecture in New York City, USA, (July 2010)

J. Howard Moore photo

“We think of our acts toward non-human peoples, when we think of them at all, entirely from the human point of view.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

We never take the time to put ourselves in the places of our victims. We never take the trouble to get over into their world, and realise what is happening over there as a result of our doings toward them. It is so much more comfortable not to do so—so much more comfortable to be blind and deaf and insane.
"The Psychology of Altruism", p. 304
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Henrik Ibsen photo

“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind.”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Mrs. Alving, Act II
Ghosts (1881)
Context: I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

Noah Levine photo

Related topics