Quotes About Solitude

Edward Abbey

take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it

We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we many never need to go there.

In the mixture of starlight and cloud-reflected sunlight in which the desert world is now illuminated, each single object stands forth in preternatural though transient brilliance, a final assertion of existence before the coming of night: each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate, yet joined each to every other in a unity which generously includes me and my solitude as well.

you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus.

Hinton walked blindly toward his truck, unwrapping his candy bar, while the cicada in the field and the frogs in the swampy ditch sang hosannas to the sky. PART TWO

I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

I had not been stranded upon the shore of this strange world to find myself alone and companionless.

I have grown calm and unrepining with years; and, if I am now shrinking from men, I have derived at least this advantage from the loneliness first made habitual by regret; that while I feel increased benevolence to others, I have learned to look for happiness only in myself.

Have you ever remarked, that people who live the most by themselves reflect the most upon others; and that he who lives surrounded by the million never thinks of any but the one individual — himself?

Punctuality is a virtue, If you don't mind being lonely.

Continent isolated.

Camping: The art of getting closer to nature while getting farther away from the nearest cold beverage, hot shower and flush toilet.

At 13,000 feet nothing else matters.

I'm not anti-social. I'm pro-solitude.

Strange how a teapot can represent at the same time the comforts of solitude and the pleasures of company

Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday.

It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house.

Better to live alone; with a fool there is no companionship. With few desires live alone and do no evil, like an elephant in the forest roaming at will.

Study to be quiet, and to do your own business.

Home is where you can say anything you like cause nobody listens to you anyway.