Top 100 Michael Finkel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world is a confusing place, meaningful and meaningless at once.”

— Michael Finkel

2. “Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can’t dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.”

— Michael Finkel

3. “Freud said there’s no such thing as a joke – a joke is an expression of veiled hostility.”

— Michael Finkel

4. “If you like solitude, you’re never alone.”

— Michael Finkel

5. “Life is a constant, merciless fight that everyone loses.”

— Michael Finkel

6. “Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.”

— Michael Finkel

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

— Michael Finkel

8. “The internet, wrote Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, his book about brain science and screen time, steadily chips away at one’s “capacity for concentration and contemplation.”

— Michael Finkel

9. “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders;.”

— Michael Finkel

10. “People are to be taken in very small doses,” wrote Emerson. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

— Michael Finkel

11. “The note was brief – three paragraphs, two hundred and seventy-three words, the lines crowded together as if for warmth.”

— Michael Finkel

12. “Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see “the unfathomable stupidity of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Wherever is the crowd is a common denominator of stench.” Knight’s best friend, Thoreau, believed that all societies, no matter how well intentioned, pervert their citizens. Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.”

— Michael Finkel

13. “It’s better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent,” he said, repeating a family maxim. “I was tough and.”

— Michael Finkel

14. “Socrates may have concluded that his most valuable possession was his leisure. “Beware the barrenness of a busy life” is a quote commonly attributed to him.”

— Michael Finkel

15. “The word “noise” is derived from the Latin word nausea.”

— Michael Finkel

16. “Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it’s worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets.”

— Michael Finkel

17. “There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.”

— Michael Finkel

18. “I think that most of us feel like something is missing from our lives. And I wondered then if Knight’s journey was to seek it. But life isn’t about searching endlessly to find what’s missing. It’s about learning to live with the missing parts.”

— Michael Finkel

19. “He was never once bored. He wasn’t sure, he said, that he even understood the concept of boredom. It applied only to people who felt they had to be doing something all the time, which from what he’d observed was most people. Hermits of ancient China had understood that wu wei, “non-doing,” was an essential part of life, and Knight believes there isn’t nearly enough nothing in the world anymore.”

— Michael Finkel

20. “Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see “the unfathomable stupidity of man.”

— Michael Finkel

21. “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.”

— Michael Finkel

22. “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.”

— Michael Finkel

23. “The more you realize, the more you realize there is nothing to realize,” she said. “The idea that there’s somewhere we have got to get to, and something we have to attain, is our basic delusion.”

— Michael Finkel

24. “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.”

— Michael Finkel

25. “That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable.” Later he added, “I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can’t keep quiet.”

— Michael Finkel

26. “Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude “that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.”

— Michael Finkel

27. “Everyone dreams of dropping out of the world once in a while. Then you get in the car and drive back home.”

— Michael Finkel

28. “He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him.”

— Michael Finkel

29. “People are to be taken in very small doses,” wrote Emerson. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” Knight read the Tao Te Ching and felt a deep-rooted connection to the verses. “Good walking,” says the Tao, “leaves no tracks.”

— Michael Finkel

30. “I’m not used to seeing people’s faces. There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast.”

— Michael Finkel

31. “One’s desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin – sometimes called the master chemical of sociability – and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.”

— Michael Finkel

32. “Two of life’s greatest pleasures, by my reckoning, are camping and reading – most gloriously, both at once.”

— Michael Finkel

33. “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.”

— Michael Finkel

34. “He sat quietly, whether thinking or fuming or both, it was hard to tell. But he eventually arrived at a reply. It felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life. “Get enough sleep,” he said. He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn’t be saying any more. This was what he’d learned. I accepted it as truth.”

— Michael Finkel

35. “He marveled at the poetry of Emily Dickinson, sensing her kindred spirit. For the last seventeen years of her life, Dickinson rarely left her home in Massachusetts and spoke to visitors only through a partially closed door. “Saying nothing, ” she wrote, “sometimes says the most.”

— Michael Finkel

36. “Soon he essentially stopped talking. “I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode,” he mentioned. Eventually, he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. “I am surprised,” he wrote, “by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable.” Later he added, “I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can’t keep quiet.”

— Michael Finkel

37. “I understand I’ve made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label ‘crazy’ bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response. When someone asks if you’re crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There’s no good answer.”

— Michael Finkel

38. “He mentioned that he didn’t like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn’t quite true. “I don’t like people who like Jack Kerouac,” he clarified.”

— Michael Finkel

39. “The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of human interactions was so complex.”

— Michael Finkel

40. “Not for a moment did he consider keeping a journal. He would never allow anyone to read his private thoughts; therefore, he did not risk writing them down. “I’d rather take it to my grave,” he said. And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? “It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie, ” he said, “or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.”

— Michael Finkel

41. “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.”

— Michael Finkel

42. “He gorged himself on sugar and alcohol – it was the quickest way to gain weight, and he liked the feeling of inebriation.”

— Michael Finkel

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

— Michael Finkel

44. “And what about a text message? Isn’t that just using a telephone as a telegraph?”

— Michael Finkel

45. “Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.”

— Michael Finkel

46. “People earnestly say to me here, ‘Mr Knight, we have cellphones now, and you’re going to really enjoy them.’ That’s their enticement for me to rejoin society. ‘You’re going to love it,’ they say. I have no desire. And what about a text message? Isn’t that just using a telephone as a telegraph? We’re going backwards.”

— Michael Finkel

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

— Michael Finkel

48. “With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. He scratches furiously at his knees. Jail, he’s realized, might not be all bad. There’s routine and order in jail, and he’s able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in terms of steeliness of mental state, to the one he’d perfected during winters in the woods. “I’m surrounded in here by less than desirable people,” he says, “but at least I wasn’t thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim.”

— Michael Finkel

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

— Michael Finkel

50. “What I miss most in the woods,” Knight said, “is somewhere in between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness.” To reach this pristine state, the forest hard-frozen and the animals hunkered, he had to bring himself to the brink of death.”

— Michael Finkel