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"Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us."
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"You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you're the house where people come and go as they please, because you're simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn't let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You're still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn't have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert."

"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."

"I might be tempted to socialize more if the conversations taking place around me were half as interesting as the dialogue going on inside my head."

"When alone, concentrate on the fruits of the solitude, not on the poisons of it!"

"Sometimes solitude is a real heaven for the tired minds and a marvellous sanctuary for the wounded souls!"

"We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.One's inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one's most intimate sources.In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures."

"Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."

"You must suffer me to go my own dark way."
Explore more quotes by Henry David Thoreau

"I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness."

"True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance."

"A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor."

"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post office, and at the sociable, and at the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another."

"There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance."

"The silence rings-it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible-I hear the unspeakable."

"They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures."
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