We should reserve a back shop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.
Montaigne, Of Solitude
The best description of an inner life I know, and it is a shopkeeper's metaphor.
Solitude & quiet
Not the same as loneliness, though they use the same furniture. The passages here are all, in one way or another, about the back room a person keeps for themselves.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Thoreau, Walden
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.
Thoreau, Walden
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Pascal, Pensées
Overquoted, and still true every time I reach for my phone in a waiting room.
The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Emerson, Self-Reliance
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom.
Schopenhauer, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
Too absolute to be quite right, but I keep it for the second clause.
Men seek retreats for themselves — houses in the country, seashores, mountains; but this is altogether unphilosophical, when it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV
O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade.
Cowper, The Task
Written in 1785. The wish has only got louder.