Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

I'm really fascinated by the self and how our selves shift and change over time and in relationship to different people.

Socially I never was an outsider. I have never thought of the conflict element before frankly, but perhaps it was wanting to belong, and at the same time wanting to retain one's own personality.

I've locked myself in my room and wanted to be on my own a lot in my career, but I don't do that anymore.

You cannot build up a character in a solitude; you need a formed character to stand a solitude.

As for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plane at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

I... keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if... if only there were no other people in the world.

A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.

You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so I made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

In the end, as you get older and older, your life is your life, and you are alone with it.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

I need not to be more with others, but to be more & more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds.

But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.