The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
There is convincing evidence that the search for solitude is not a luxury but a biological need. Just as humans posses a herding instinct that keeps us close to others most of the time, we also have a conflicting drive to seek out solitude. If the distance between ourselves and others becomes too great, we experience isolation and alienation, yet if the proximity to others becomes too close, we feel smothered and trapped.
This great misfortune — to be incapable of solitude.
Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel –or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime.
To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self.
True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.
Two Paradises t'were in one, to live in Paradise alone.
Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.
We never touch but at points.
We walk alone in the world.
Well has he lived who has lived well in obscurity.
What call thou solitude? Is not the earth with various living creatures, and the air replenished, and all these at thy command to come and play before thee?
When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign in solitude.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
You have already failed if you need a lot of inspectors.
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