Nicholas Haslam Quotes

I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.

I'm learning a lot about myself being alone, and doing what I'm doing.

Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.

Experiencing those moments of being alone... is a very, very weird flooring and exposing position to be in when you're just not used to it... But I've never been lonely. And with my kids Mia and Joe that remains the case.

It's interesting that reading, like listening to podcasts, is a lone pursuit, one where we keep our mouths shut and let someone else do the talking. Where we absorb rather than emit. By occasionally isolating ourselves, we can more successfully, more generously, socialise.

Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Leave. Roll the world around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful world, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

We teach what we need to learn.

Eventually, we all end up alone.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

Out of the house and on my own, I faced the fact I didn't much like who I was. I didn't like my judgmentalism; I didn't like my absolutism. I didn't like my repression of natural empathy, my pinched lack of emotional generosity. How I had been thinking politically had less to do with what was wrong with the world and more to do with what was wrong with me, with my fears and insecurities, failings, weaknesses.

The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.

This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?

When you turn out the light, I've got to hand it to me. Looks like it's you and me again tonight Rosie.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation.

Me, myself and I. That's all I got in the end.

Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.

I like to be alone. I am focused on what I am doing. I feel the nature and I feel my body. It's so simple.