Henri J. M. Nouwen

If you feel a great loneliness and a deep longing for human contact, you have to be extremely discerning…and ask yourself whether this situation is truly God given. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain. To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that you want only to be where God is with you. The more deeply you live your spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the difference between living with God and living without God, and the easier it will be to move away from the places where God is no longer with you.

Elisabeth Elliot

Loneliness comes over us sometimes as a sudden tide. It is one of the terms of our humanness, and, in a sense, therefore, incurable. Yet I have found peace in my loneliest times not only through acceptance of the situation, but through making it an offering to God, who can transfigure it into something for the good of others.

David Kidd

Deep within there is a glorious and terrible empty space – loneliness. It is out of sight, pushing us to our best and to our worst. Behind every effort to make a friend – Behind ambition – Behind pride – Behind gossip – Behind memories of your mother’s kitchen – Loneliness. We were created with the space carefully planted in our hearts. God created us with the loneliness that moves the heart to others, the loneliness that moves the heart at last to God. Is it what moves us to become whole.

John Angell James

We do not think enough of Christ’s second coming. What would be said of the wife who, when her husband was away in another country, could be happy without him, and be contented to think rarely of him. On the contrary, the loving wife longs for her husband’s return. Oh, when will he come back! is her frequent exclamation. Wife of the Lamb, church of the Saviour, where is thy Lord? Is this thy blessed hope, as it was that of the primitive church? O Christian, are these not wanting here? Every morsel of that bread thou eatest at the sacramental table, every drop of wine thou drinkest, is the voice of Christ saying to thee, I will come again, and receive you to myself; and should draw forth thy longing desires, Come, Lord Jesus; even so, come quickly.