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For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.

Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.

Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.

An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind, and when you lay down on the pillow at night, no matter who’s in our bed we all sleep alone.

Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society?

Ambition is of all others the most contrary humour to solitude; glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.

Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.

it seems to me that the Muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exile as a fellow-worker

Might not someone jeer at us in the same way, as being afraid, when we have not yet one firm friendship, that we shall without knowing it fall upon an abundance of friends?

Whereas having many friends puts people apart and severs and disunites them, by transferring and shifting the tie of friendship too frequently, and does not admit of a mixture and welding of goodwill by the diffusing and compacting of intimacy.

not to find friends at a time when you want them is hard, as also not to be able to exchange an inconstant and bad friend for a constant and good one

these things occurring daily and being importunate make the mind little, and narrow, and unsocial, and harsh, and timid, so that, being besieged and taken in hand by grief, it can no longer laugh, and shuns daylight, and avoids society

The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner,--each concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association.

Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish.

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

A long life may be passed without finding a friend in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and sincerity.

By this practice he may obtain the solitude of adversity without its melancholy, its instructions without its censures, and its sensibility without its perturbations.

Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way.

There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after it, and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end probably produces ill-humour.

Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull common-places, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases.