“I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.”

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

It is never too late to give up your prejudices.

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

The savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.

Don’t let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.

I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.

We may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.