The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person — without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And what we do with that sentence — whether we scratch at the walls or write on them — is perhaps the only freedom we are given.

We live, as we dream — alone; and what we hope for, what we think we know — of ourselves, of others — is in truth only the dream of a dreamer.

We are always in our own company. Sometimes I feel I could tear myself open, not out of pain, but out of curiosity.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the depths of another person — without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

We are always in our own company. A man must know how to be alone, even in a crowd, even in a vast solitude; for what we seek in others is ourselves, and what we find is our own reflection.

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. More and more, I suspect that solitude, which is the dungeon, contains also within it the key to its own liberation.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

We are all of us the worse for too much solitude. A man who shuts himself up from his kind becomes at last unfit for society; he acquires a hundred habits and opinions incompatible with life among men, and the cure for this evil is not to be found in the society of fools, but in that of the wise.

We are all of us the worse for too much solitude. A man who shuts himself up from the world falls into an exaggerated estimate of his own importance, and loses the power of measuring himself by his fellows.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self; the only escape is through love and beauty and truth.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in our thoughts. We think too much and feel too little. Silence has become rather uncommon, and these days, even loneliness is a luxury we can't afford.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self, said the Trappist abbot; we must learn to like the company.