F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I've always enjoyed people studying themselves in the mirror, and I also enjoy those 'walk and feel bad' shots. I like anything that isolates people and focuses them on themselves, or makes us focus on their faces as they're going through something.

To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

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.

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

In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.

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

My music must reflect whatever's going on in my mind, and my life needs to evolve for me to discover who it is I'm becoming.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Genius develops in quiet places; character out of the full current of human life.

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

Only in Relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It's the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities.

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone –as it seems to me– is in danger.

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.

One's better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one's own. In fact it's a terrible business and the task is a hard one.

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.

Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.

I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit.

Intimacy seems to be one of the major highs of life, whether it's getting to know yourself in a deeper way, or your partner, or the world and the society that you live in.

Writing is a tribute to solitude. It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.