Echoes

He who cannot find himself the retreat of his own soul, let him appeal to solitude — if he can even bear himself.

Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard.

The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

Withdraw into yourself as much as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?

The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become preoccupied with what we are not.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.

Nowhere you can go is more peaceful — more free of interruptions — than your own soul.

Boredom is the root of all evil — the despairing refusal to be oneself.

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

It is better to be alone than in bad company.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will... The really diligent student... is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome.

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Never did I think so much, never did I realize my own existence so much, never was I so much alive, so much myself, as in those journeys which I made alone and on foot.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.