Richard Jefferies Quotes

There is much to be said for solitude.

I want to be alone with my thought.

And then the days came when I was alone.

The great virtue of being alone is that your mind can go its own way.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.

Though He had so much work to do with others, yet He [Jesus] chose sometimes to be alone, to set us an example.

I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

I like my quiet time. There is a writer's sensibility in me sometimes, where I step back.

Imagination flourishes best in solitude.

I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me.

Well, what do you owe yourself? Do you dare take time out to listen to the grass grow, or can you even afford the expense of getting far enough away from life's daily cacophony to hear it grow if you took the time?

In a crowd, on a journey, at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.

I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.

How deeply one felt when alone.

After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it.

Certain springs are tapped only when you're alone.

By myself walking, To myself talking.

Can we not do without the society of our gossip a little while, - have our own thoughts to cheer us?

No man is an island, as they say. No. I've tried it. I've gone on retreats at various times in my life for three or four or five days. I was desperate to get out of there and talk to somebody. But I fly fish a lot, and I can only do that really by myself. I find I'm never lonesome when I'm on a river, far from it, but it's a lonely practice.

Ah! Wretched and too solitary he who loves not his own company.

I want to be alone ... I just want to be alone.