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Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less troublesome for being less important.

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

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

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?

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.

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!

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.

If trees could speak, hundreds of them would say that I had had these soul-emotions under them.

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.

A good conscience fears no witnesses, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even of solitude.

A wise man is never so busy as in the solitary contemplation of God and the works of Nature.

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.

It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's own thoughts.

When he undertakes to play a part on the stage, and to persuade the world to think more about him than they do about themselves, he is got into a track where he will find nothing but briars and thorns, vexation and disappointment.

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.

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.

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

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget,--but not himself, his own character.

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

Nothing is so insupportable to man as to be completely at rest, without passion, without business, without diversion, without study.

all the misfortunes of men arise from one thing only, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own chamber

This west coast makes me remember with pleasure the free, unbounded plains of Patagonia; yet, with the true spirit of contradiction, I cannot forget how sublime is the silence of the forest.