Solitude - 孤独

No one talks better about solitude than Thoreau. Making friend with oneself is a mission of life, sooner accomplished the better. We have to be alone if we want to enjoy ourselves to the utmost.  

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. -- Thoreau

I was never less alone than by myself. --Edward Gibbon

Content thyself to be obscurely good.
When vice prevails,
And impious men bear away,
The post of honor is a private station. --Joseph Addison

Can you enjoy being alone? If you can't, it's probably a sign that you aren't able to discover quality in your own character. Put another way, you have low self-esteem, a sense of feeling unworthy and undeserving of your own company.

One of the pleasantest thing in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone. --William Hazilitt

I must desire solitude if I dare to exist out of my own primal sources and thus to enter into the deepest communication.

The yardstick for a human being is how long and to what degree he can bear to be alone, devoid of understanding with others. A man who could bear being alone during a whole lifetime, and alone in decisions of eternal significance, is farthest removed from the infant and the society-person who represent the animal definition of a human being. --Kierkegaard

分析起来，孤独感的出现，很多时候并不是因为身边缺乏人的存在，而基本上是内心恐惧或空虚的一种反应，跟周围环境并没有什么太大的联系。有时候，闹市和喧哗反而会给人带来强烈的孤独感，而世上最孤独的人往往就是那些整日生活在人群当中的人。孤独当然跟性格有关，有的人天生喜欢清静，有的人天生喜欢热闹，但是真正的孤独感跟性格没有关系。