The quote database

In the ages of equality all men are independent of each other, isolated and weak.

It tends to isolate them from each other, to concentrate every man's attention upon himself; and it lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification.

The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.

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.

The prime reason for social intercourse is mutual need; and as soon as that is satisfied, boredom drives people together once more.

Great minds are like eagles, and build their nest in some lofty solitude.

the need of society drives the human porcupines together--only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature

It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable.

Ordinary people are sociable and complaisant just from the very opposite feeling;--to bear others' company is easier for them than to bear their own.

My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you.

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object.

To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.

Presently, after this was at an end, my mother died, and I was left at liberty to mourn her loss awhile.

you would wonder at seeing how possible it is to live as secludedly in the midst of a multitude as in the centre of solitude

For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of man and man--in society--it must be unavoidably impure.

A gloomy sensation of agonising, everlasting solitude and remoteness, took conscious form in his soul.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised

The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.

The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible!

What signifies the census--this periodical numbering of men--to one who has no friend?

Our thoughts would imply that other men have friends, though we have not.

Now at least the moon is full, and I walk alone, which is best by night, if not by day always.