It is better for you to live privately and take care of yourself than it is to neglect your soul even though you could work wonders in the world.

Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.

The kingdom of God is within you, as the Lord says. Turn to the Lord with all your heart, leave this miserable world behind, and you will find rest for your soul.

God is the partner of our most intimate soliloquies. That is to say, whenever you are talking to yourself in utmost sincerity and ultimate solitude--he to whom you are addressing yourself may justifiably be called God.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For, he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, I have done with men.

There is perhaps a kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

The pain of aloneness and pointlessness is piercing. It demands relief. That single fact — that the pain of living apart from God is unbearable — exposes our sinfulness as horribly grotesque and foolish. We insist on finding relief without coming to God on His terms.

I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere.

The strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.