Loren Eiseley Quotes

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.

When everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.

I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see.

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger.

There are moments when it's too quiet. Particularly late at night or early in the mornings. That's when you know there's something lacking in your life. You just know.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

I genuinely believed no one would want to marry me. I am difficult to live with. I'm selfish, quite weird and I need time on my own to think - and then I work all night long. That is difficult for someone to deal with. And it would drive me mad - I could never be my own girlfriend!

When even the most strictly logical mind looks round and investigates the phenomena attending its own existence, perhaps the first fact to attract attention by its strongly marked prominence is the remarkable loneliness of man. He stands alone.

Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.

The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.

Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

Sometimes I get lonely, but it's nice to be alone.

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

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

In my deepest troubles, I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests.

A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive.

Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.

We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.

There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.