“In life there are certain sores that, like a canker, gnaw at the soul in solitude and diminish it.”

“The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.”

“There is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity.”

“Solitude is not the absence of company, but the moment when our soul is free to speak to us and help us decide what to do with our life.”

“True solitude is in the soul. The soul has as its desert and homeland God Himself, the father and teacher of all souls”

“True happiness is impossible without solitude…. I need solitude in my life as I need food and drink and the laughter of little children. Extravagant though it may sound, solitude is the filter of my soul. It nourishes me, and rejuvenates me. Left alone, I discovered that I keep myself good company.”

“Life's a pudding full of plums;
Care's a canker that benumbs,
Wherefore waste our elocution
On impossible solution?
Life's a pleasant institution,
Let us take it as it comes!”

“We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the unborn — without diminishing the value of all human life.”

“The reward of renunciation is some good greater than the thing renounced. To renounce with no vision of such a good, from fear or in automatic obedience to a formula, is to weaken the springs of life, and to diminish the soul's resistance to this world.”

“Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.”