Solitude

NO MAN IS LONELY WHILE EATING SPAGHETTI: IT REQUIRES SO MUCH ATTENTION.

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

I lived in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in maturity.

I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude—a feeling which increases over the years.

You are surprised, aren’t you, at the contrast between my fame throughout the world… and the isolation and quiet in which I live here. I wished for this isolation all my life, and now I have finally achieved it here in Princeton.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced freedom from the need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.

With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.

Life is the desert, life the solitude;

Behold her, single in the field,

Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

In all directions stretched the great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Hell is other people.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Le commencement et le déclin de l’amour se font sentir par l’embarras où l’on est de se trouver seuls.

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

Then on the shore

In a solitude of the sea

None but the lonely heart

How does it feel