Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that’s a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.

I love to be alone, and I did as a child as well, especially if I was outside.

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

After the first day of practice, there’s not one guy who’s playing at 100 percent or who feels great. Sometimes, getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth is the hardest part of the day – it just hurts.

My performance outfits are very Marie Antoinette, sparkly corsets… and full skirts. And then we do another look that’s ’50s-inspired. Poufy skirts, big bows. Very fun, girlie and young, but otherwise, when I’m not in costume, I dress really normal.

Solitude is independence.

Both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom: the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come.

I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

I have long understood that losing always comes with the territory when you wander into the gambling business, just as getting crippled for life is an acceptable risk in the linebacker business. They both are extremely violent sports, and pain is part of the bargain. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

I’m an introvert… I love being by myself, love being outdoors, love taking a long walk with my dogs and looking at the trees, flowers, the sky.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother… We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain.

We make the Sabbath a delight when we teach the gospel to our children.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

I think Mustique is Duchampian – it will always provide an endless source of delight.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

My demo was terrible, I sounded like a chipmunk. I was so young.

Hermits have no peer pressure.