Solitude Quotes

“As the twenty-first century lurches forward, though, we find that love letters—so awkward, so slow, so exhausting to compose—are an endangered species. We forget that romantic connections benefit from solitude nearly as much as the beloved’s company.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Our best thinkers may also crave solitude because, as Storr notes, “ideas are sensitive plants which wilt if exposed to premature scrutiny.”25”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“The difference between Before and After is that today we need to safeguard our inner weirdo, seal it off and protect it from being buffeted. Learn an old torch song that nobody knows; read a musty, out-of-print detective novel; photograph a honey-perfect sunset and show it to no one. We may need to build new and stronger weirdo cocoons, in which to entertain our private selves. Beyond the sharing, the commenting, the constant thumbs-upping, beyond all that distracting gilt, there are stranger things waiting to be loved.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“nervous hive mentality; it reminds us the self is no monster after all.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Has social media made us socially obese—gorged on constant connection but never properly nourished?”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Perhaps future generations will hack the system, move at will between storytelling technologies. As for me, I was retreating from the social option. I began taking myself to the water’s edge in order to read—away from the phone and the terrible Cyclops eye of my modem. On the seawall, bundled against wind and propped up with a sweater for a seat, I rediscovered a frame of mind that I was in danger of forgetting—real, trance-like reading that obliterated my anxieties, my fussing daily life.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Switching our allegiance from one Big Brother to the next cannot purchase independent thought.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“We cannot compound the ideas of others into a singular meaning for ourselves unless we’re given a private mental workshop in which to hammer at them. (Will I ever be able to write my book, I worry, if I can’t build such a workshop for myself?) Without daydreams our minds are only parrots—or, worse, computers. Daydreams are the engineers of new worlds.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Our online crowds are so insistent, so omnipresent, that we now must actively elbow out the forces that encroach on solitude’s borders, or else forfeit to them a large portion of our mental landscape.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Until recently, though, there were still moments in the day when the busyness abated and life’s pace decelerated. You would find yourself alone, separated from friends and colleagues, and you would be thrown back on your own resources, your own thoughts. Such interludes could provoke feelings of loneliness and boredom. Yet they also provided opportunities to tap into ideas, perceptions, and emotions inaccessible to the social self.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“To be happily alone is to affirm one’s faith in the love of others.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself. —Coco Chanel”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“The daydreamer is like the tree in which she crouches, oblivious to the red-faced plans of industry. It’s understood that if someone were to come along and put her mind “to use,” she would gain little from the interruption.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“To write is to divorce the world and temporarily marry an idea of it instead.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“When speaking: avoid jargon and slang, since “someone with style shuns identification with a group.”65”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Meanwhile, I start to see time-devouring apps like Candy Crush as pacifiers for a culture unwilling or unable to experience a finer, adult form of leisure. We believed those who told us that the devil loves idle hands. And so we gave our hands over for safekeeping. We long for constant proof of our effectiveness, our accomplishments. And perhaps it’s this longing for proof, for glittering external validation, that makes our solitude so vulnerable to those who would harvest it.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“And what about the hundreds of bits of brain-flotsam that I immediately forgot or couldn’t put down in words? The process looks nothing like the Cartesian vision of the mind we’re sometimes fed—with the little man, my “self,” rational and purposeful, at the helm of the brain, guiding me toward a sublime conclusion. Instead, the brain of a daydreamer does not much care whether it arrives anywhere at all”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Even when we’ve grown, lamented Buchholz, society simply refuses to let people be mateless. “All the push, all the time, is toward relationships, and if you resist that you’re just considered antisocial or crazy.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“love to be alone,” says Thoreau. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“only someone who feels at risk of being abandoned”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“As Jung has it: “a being distinct from the general, collective psychology”31 will experience “an enriching of conscious psychological life;”32 being a true individual is a “coming to selfhood or ‘self-realization.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“individuation”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“showing that solitude enhances one’s mental freedom, unshackling us by minimizing the intrusive self-consciousness that the presence of others inevitably produces.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“He believed that the greatest benefit of solitude is its ability to engender new ideas. A leading”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“The alternative to solitude is loneliness.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing—to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having coffee—because whoever can do nothing, letting his thoughts go where they may, must be at peace with himself.”53”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“The inventions of writers and artists are forged through dissatisfaction. That discrepancy between the world we walk through and the world inside of us encourages some to try to build a bridge (in the shape of a book about talking bunnies or an impressionistic painting). A perfectly happy artist would be a failure.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“only someone who feels at risk of being abandoned would be uneasy with periodic detachment. These, then, are solitude’s uses: new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others. Taken together, these three ingredients build a rich interior life.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“The cliché of the painter locked away in a studio, the writer in his cabin, the scientist in her late-night laboratory, is no accident. And Storr’s assertion was backed up in 1994 when the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the originator of the concept of “flow” in work) found that teenagers who can’t stand being alone tend to have lessened creative abilities.24 Only in solitude could those youths develop the creative habits—journalling, doodling, daydreaming—that lead to original work.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World