Quotes about Isolation

I was very depressed when I was 19... I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

Solitude is sometimes best society.

I endeavored to renounce society, that I might avoid temptation. But it was a poor religion; so far as it prevailed, only tended to make me gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless.

Solitude is sometimes the best society.

The strange things about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost. One feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward.

The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed ; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight.

Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived.

That's one of the disadvantages of getting older; you're inclined to make intimate contacts with fewer people.

This is how one ought to see, I repeated yet again. And I might have added, These are the sort of things one ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of God.

So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society.