Nat Turner Quotes

The way I spend my time is very isolated and cut off.

Much like anyone with too much time on his or her hands, I feel as though I am the most important person on earth and everything I do is relevant. I say the most charming and inspired things when no one is around.

There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.

It's hard to be humble, when you're as great as I am.

I had friends but I was spending a great deal of my time alone and for me that was vital because there's an awful lot you learn about yourself when you're alone.

A lot of self-importance goes on in the fashion industry. I'm not like that.

I should have been a Trappist monk.

The silent killer of all great men and women of achievement - particularly men, I don't know why, maybe it's the testosterone - I think it's narcissism. Even more than hubris. And for women, too. Narcissism is the killer.

Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

The vain being is the really solitary being.

It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

Isolation breeds conceit.

That which happens to the soil when it ceases to be cultivated by the social man happens to man himself when he foolishly forsakes society for solitude; the brambles grow up in his desert heart.

A hermit is one who renounces the world of fragments that he may enjoy the world wholly and without interruption.

Society than solitude is worse, And man to man is still the greatest curse.

And when we would make much of that which cannot matter much to thee, forgive us -a frequent part of the prayer that opened sermons.

I think half the troubles for which men go slouching in prayer to God are caused by their intolerable pride. Many of our cares are but a morbid way of looking at our privileges. We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses.

I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. Yet some of my acquaintance would fain hustle me into the almshouse for the sake of society, as if I were pining for that diet, when I seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. However, they do not believe a word I say.

No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.

Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.

I pray you bear me henceforth from the noise and rumour of the field, where I may think the remnant of my thoughts in peace, and part of this body and my soul with contemplation and devout desires.

. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.