When you think like a hermit, you forget what you know.

In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.

He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.

I've been following the noble profession of hermiting here for nigh on fifty-seven years, practising piety, sobriety, celibacy and the pursuit of true wisdom in the tradition of my father and grandfather and great-grandfather before me.

The silence outside was reflected by a growing silence within. Any interior monologue quietened to a whisper, then faded away entirely.

I’m a heartless optimist. This combination could make me lethal, but mostly it has led to a successful hermit lifestyle.

An individualist—a man who has no intention of ever exploring the goals of others because he has no intention of compromising with his own—may become: (a) a hermit of limited goals, (b) a tyrant surrounded by slaves with rebellion in his future and covert hostility in his present.

Sometimes the idea of living as a hermit appeals to all of us. No demands, no needs, no pain, no disappointments. But that is because we have been hurt, are worn out.

She could hide in this small, dull life.

Through even perhaps no one's making but their own, there are people out there who don't at all feel themselves designed for other people because they're seldom understood; howbeit not in some rebellious, angsty way - just really, gravely mistaken.