105 Quotes by Michael Finkel

Tao Te Ching says that it is only through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction rather than action, that we acquire wisdom. “Those with less become content,” says the Tao, “those with more become confused.” The poems, still widely read, have been hailed as a hermit manifesto for more than two thousand years.

There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,′ Knight said.

Noise harms your body and boils your brain. The word “noise” derives from the Latin word nausea.

Passion must be subject to reason; emotions lead one astray. “There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain.

Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there’s innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It’s part of being human.

The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that “no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living. Knight.

I become a transparent eyeball,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Nature.” “I am nothing; I see all.” Lord Byron called it “the feeling infinite”; Jack Kerouac, in Desolation Angels, “the one mind of infinity.” The French Catholic priest Charles de Foucauld, who spent fifteen years living in the Sahara Desert, said that in solitude “one empties completely the small house of one’s soul.” Merton wrote that “the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself.” This.

Not till we have lost the world,” wrote Thoreau, “do we begin to find ourselves.