Henry David Thoreau

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.

I love to be alone.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

if with closed eyes I consult consciousness for a moment immediately are all walls and barriers dissipated earth rolls from under me and I float in the midst of an unknown and infinite sea or else heave and swell like a vast ocean of thought without rock or headland

Where are all riddles solved?

All straight lines making their, their two ends to meet.

Eternity and space gambling familiarly through my depths.

I am from the beginning, knowing no end, no aim.

No sun illumines me, for I dissolve all lesser lights in my own intenser and steadier light.

I am a restful kernel in the magazine of the universe.

Men are constantly dinging in my ears their fair theories and plausible solutions of the universe.

But ever there is no help.

And I return again to my sure-less,

islandless ocean.

In my better hours, I am conscious of the influx of a serene and unquestionable wisdom.

What is that other kind of life to which I am thus continually allured

which alone I love?

Are our serene moments simply a transient realization of what might be the whole tenor of our lives?

To be calm, to be serene,