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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.

Furthermore, Friendship seems to be the bond of Social Communities, and legislators seem to be more anxious to secure it than Justice even.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know me.

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

The partners, and the clerks, with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely associated--being suddenly removed from them--they seemed as dead to me.

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

If I associate not with these people,-- with mankind,-- with whom shall I associate?

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

It is not kind in you to desire an increase of my friendship; that is to doubt it is not as great already as it can be, than which you cannot do me a greater injury.

The unity of God preserves a unity in men--that is, a perpetual sympathy between man and man--which sympathy we must be subject to, if not in our joys, yet in our griefs.

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

There are probably as many different dialects for the heart as for the tongue, are there not?

If sorrow in its reaction makes us think of our friends, let my name come among the list of yours to you, and with it let the thought come that I am not the coldest and least sincere.

There is only one event in my life which never loses its bitterness; which comes back on me like a retreating wave, going and coming again, which was and is my grief--I never had but one brother who loved and comprehended me.

The breakfast was eaten in silence, the women humbled with a sense of their helplessness, and the men gratified with a sense of their power.

The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.