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"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today -- all without seeing him. It is a long time to be alone; still, it is better to be alone that unwelcome. I had to have company -- I was made for it, I think -- so I made friends with the animals."
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Exlpore more Solitude quotes
"I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative."
"A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things."
"When you want to be alone, even few people around you will seem like a tremendous crowd to you!"
"When you understand that through the power of conversion in solitude you can become great, so many things you've been wasting your time on will no longer interest you. You will even run away from some friends."
"Without solitude, we are overwhelmed by all the things we hope to do and all of the things we hope to do and all of the things we are planning and praying to do but we never really have the time to actually get down and get these things done."
"An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."
"That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."
"I live alone," he said simply. "I live in the open. I hear the waves at night and see the black patterns of the pine boughs against the sky. With sound and silence and color and solitude, of course I see visions. Anyone would.""But you don't believe in them?" Doc asked hopefully."I don't find it a matter for belief or disbelief," the seer said. "You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks into the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself everytime that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it? Don't you see visions?""No," said Doc."
Explore more quotes by Mark Twain
"Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."
"In the afternoon the ship's company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the asthmatic meodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled the Star Spangled Banner, the choir chased it to cover, and George came in with a peculiarly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered it. Nobody mourned. We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not intentional and I do not endorse it)."
"When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved."
"The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little."
"Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."
"Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed - because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays."
"T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."
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