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1953·Trappist, Kentucky, USA
Henry David Thoreau·1859I 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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau·1782Never 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.
Baltasar Gracián·1647He 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.
We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have.
