To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
About This Quote

To be alone with oneself is to be in solitude. If you are alone, you are by yourself. There is no one beside you. Your spirit is not disturbed.

You are totally alone in your thoughts. Being alone with oneself has benefits, but people who choose to be alone all the time can end up like hermits or secluded monks. Being alone is not the same as being lonely, because if you are lonely, someone else is always in your inner circle of thoughts.

The seclusion only makes the loneliness worse because it prevents communication with other people. The seclusion also creates problems when you spend too much time inside your head and forget to live in the real world where people are.

Source: Nature And Selected Essays

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy - Isaac Newton
  2. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow? - Annie Dillard
  3. When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough. - Hediger
  4. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more - George Gordon Byron
  5. The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean. - Robinson Jeffers
More Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson
  1. Love, and you shall be loved.
  2. He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
  3. The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.
  4. Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
  5. It is not the length of life, but the depth.
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