51
the need of society drives the human porcupines together--only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature
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Feeling
Attribution
52
The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.
53
What signifies the census--this periodical numbering of men--to one who has no friend?
Henry David Thoreauverified·Journal, Volume II: 1850-September 15, 1851 (ed. Bradford Torrey)·April 29, 1851
54
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.
55
It is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak: only at moments when reality lies far away, and we do not wish to be conscious of our brethren.
56
Some there are that have no silence, and that kill the silence around them, and these are the only creatures that pass through life unperceived.
57
There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.
58
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.
59
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
60
Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish.
61
By this practice he may obtain the solitude of adversity without its melancholy, its instructions without its censures, and its sensibility without its perturbations.
62
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.
63
Most of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemies, or cold, uncomfortable acquaintance.
William Hazlittverified·On Living to One's-Self, in Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners·January 1821
64
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god
Wrongly attributed
Sold everywhere as Aristotle's, and the thought is his — Politics I.2 argues that anyone who cannot live in society is either a beast or a god. But this English sentence is Bacon's, in Of Friendship, and he does not endorse it. He introduces it as a speech by someone unnamed that puts "more truth and untruth together in few words" than any he knows, then argues only the first half holds: a hatred of society has something of the savage beast in it, but it is "most untrue that it should have any character of the divine nature". The line is quoted as wisdom by people who have not read the sentence that follows it.