Sermon quotes on isolation
G.K. Chesterton
Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.”
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
John Donne
No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
Arthur Conan Doyle
“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
Brian Fikkert and Kelly M. Kapic
Harvard Professor Robert Putnam once lamented that Americans were “bowling alone;” increasingly, we’re also eating alone, as nobody is home for dinner.
Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty Isn’t the American Dream, Moody Publishers, 2019.
Brian Fikkert and Kelly M. Kapic
Researchers have found that more than half a million people in Japan stay at home for at least six months at a time without having any contact with the outside world.
Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty Isn’t the American Dream, Moody Publishers, 2019.
Edith Hamilton
Pain is the most individualizing thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization comes only when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself. Only individuals can suffer.
Jay Y. Kim
This is the ultimate paradox of the digital age: at the moment in human history when technology allows us to be more connected than ever, we are so very far apart, to the point that our very understanding of “community” has devolved into a sort of collection of isolated individuals.
Taken from Analog Church by Jay Y. Kim Copyright (c) 2020 by Jay Y. Kim. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
James Howard Kunstler
If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of our time. We worship this idealized container for family life, and yet it turns out that the family cannot be sustained without the larger container of community life.
Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century Simon & Schuster, 1998.
James Howard Kunstler
The idea of a modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an antisocial view of existence. I don’t believe that we can afford to keep pretending that life is a never-ending episode of Littie House on the Prairie. We are going to have to develop a different notion of the good life and create a physical form that accommodates it.
Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century Simon & Schuster, 1998.
John G. McGraw
In the movie Now, Voyager, actor, Paul Henried, in solemn, even ominous tones, proclaims that “some people are alone in all ways, and all people are alone in some ways.”
Intimacy and Isolation, BRILL, 2010.
Dwight L. Moody
No matter how low down you are; no matter what your disposition has been; you may be low in your thoughts, words, and actions; you may be selfish; your heart may be overflowing with corruption and wickedness; yet Jesus will have compassion upon you. He will speak comforting words to you; not treat you coldly or spurn you, as perhaps those of earth would, but will speak tender words, and words of love and affection and kindness. Just come at once. He is a faithful friend – a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.
John M. Perkins
We may be “connected,” but we’re lonely, we’re isolated from each other, and we’ve become afraid of each other. That fear has produced acts of violence that are becoming all too common.
He Calls Me Friend: The Healing Power of Friendship in a Lonely World, Moody, 2019.
Charles Spurgeon
Some Christians try to go to heaven alone, in solitude. But believers are not compared to bears or lions or other animals that wander alone. Those who belong to Christ are sheep in this respect, that they love to get together. Sheep go in flocks, and so do God’s people.
David Foster Wallace
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
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