Quotes from Michael Finkel

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Not for a moment did he consider keeping a journal. He would never allow anyone to read his private thoughts; therefore, he did not risk writing them down. "I'd rather take it to my grave," he said. And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? "It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie," he said, "or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.

Knight, of course, felt that anyone's willing assistance tainted the whole thing. Either you are hidden or you're not, no middle ground. He wished to be unconditionally alone, exiled to an island of his own creation, an uncontacted tribe of one.

It's better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent," he said, repeating a family maxim. "I was tough and

He has seen the bottomless nonsense of our world and has decided, like most of us, to simply try to tolerate it. He appears to have surrendered. It is rational,

People are to be taken in very small doses," wrote Emerson. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself." Knight read the Tao Te Ching and felt a deep-rooted connection to the verses. "Good walking," says the Tao, "leaves no tracks.

Noise harms your body and boils your brain. The word "noise" derives from the Latin word nausea.

Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can't dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here's the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.

He sat quietly, whether thinking or fuming or both, it was hard to tell. But he eventually arrived at a reply. It felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life. "Get enough sleep," he said. He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn't be saying any more. This was what he'd learned. I accepted it as truth.

What I miss most in the woods," Knight said, "is somewhere in between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness." To reach this pristine state, the forest hard-frozen and the animals hunkered, he had to bring himself to the brink of death.

Our genus, Homo, arose two and a half million years ago, and for more than ninety-nine percent of human existence, we all lived like Onwas, in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Though the groups may have been tight-knit and communal, nearly everyone, anthropologists conjecture, spent significant parts of their lives surrounded by quiet, either alone or with a few others, foraging for edible plants and stalking prey in the wild. This is who we truly are.

Brazilian government provided him with a thirty-one-square-mile region of rain forest. The land is off-limits to everyone except this man.

He never bothered listening to sports; the bored him, every one of them.

He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

The Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti has been quoted as saying, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...

And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? "It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie," he said, "or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.

The only book Knight didn't steal was the one he most often saw. 'I had no need for a Bible,' he said.

Gradually, methodically, he shed most of his anxiety. But not all. Being too relaxed, he felt, was also a danger. In appropriate doses, worry was useful, possibly lifesaving. "I used worry to encourage thought," he said. "Worry can give you an extra prod to survive and plan. And I had to plan.

But the label 'crazy' bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response." When someone asks if you're crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There's no good answer.

I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.

The word "noise" is derived from the Latin word nausea.

If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin—sometimes called the master chemical of sociability—and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.

the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself.