Top 100 Michael Finkel Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. ‘What’s the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more then there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.”

— Michael Finkel

52. “I read. That’s my form of travel.”

— Michael Finkel

53. “Knight seemed to weigh the precision of every word he used, careful as a poet. Even his handwritten letters had gone through at least one draft, he said, mostly to remove unnecessary insults. Only necessary ones remained.”

— Michael Finkel

54. “His facial hair served not just as a calendar but also as a mask, absorbing the stares of others while allowing him a little privacy in plain sight. “I can hide behind it, I can play to stereotypes and assumptions. One of the benefits of being labeled a hermit is that it permits me strange behavior.”

— Michael Finkel

55. “When he hears how songs are now shared and downloaded, Knight is equally unimpressed. “You’re using your computers, your thousand-dollar machines, to listen to the radio? Society is taking a rather strange turn.”

— Michael Finkel

56. “I have become solitary,” wrote the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men which is nourished only in betrayals and hatred.”

— Michael Finkel

57. “I do have a sense of humor,” Knight said. “I just don’t like jokes. Freud said there’s no such thing as a joke – a joke is an expression of veiled hostility.”

— Michael Finkel

58. “After ten days in solitary confinement, many prisoners display clear signs of mental harm, and one study showed that about a third will eventually develop active psychosis. There are at least eighty thousand such inmates in America. The United Nations has determined that holding a person in isolation for more than fifteen days is cruel and inhuman punishment.”

— Michael Finkel

59. “Nature, Knight clarified, is brutal. The weak do not survive, and neither do the strong. Life is a constant, merciless fight that everyone loses.”

— Michael Finkel

60. “Isolation is the raw material of greatness; being alone is hazardous to our health. Few other conditions produce such diametrically opposing reactions, though of course genius and craziness often share a fence line. Sometimes even voluntary solitude can send a person over to the wrong side of the fence.”

— Michael Finkel

61. “I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.”

— Michael Finkel

62. “Our whole lives, Jefferies said, are wasted traveling in endless small circles; we are all “chained like a horse to an iron pin in the ground.” The richest person, Jefferies believed, is the one who works least. “Idleness,” he wrote, “is a great good.” For Jefferies, like.”

— Michael Finkel

63. “I’m not sorry about being rude if it gets to the point quicker.”

— Michael Finkel

64. “Time amid the silence of nature, in other words, makes you smarter.”

— Michael Finkel

65. “Those with less become content,” says the Tao, “those with more become confused.” The.”

— Michael Finkel

66. “It’s better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent.”

— Michael Finkel

67. “In eighteenth-century England, a fad swept the upper class. Several families felt their estate needed a hermit, and advertisements were placed in newspapers for “ornamental hermits” who were slack in grooming and willing to sleep in a cave.”

— Michael Finkel

68. “More prized by his parents than good grades, Chris mentioned, was “Yankee ingenuity” – putting your smarts to work. “It’s better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent,” he said, repeating a family maxim.”

— Michael Finkel

69. “Suffering is such a deep part of living,” wrote Robert Kull, who lived alone on an island in Patagonia for a year, in 2001, “that if we try too hard to avoid it, we end up avoiding life entirely.” The Tao Te Ching says that “happiness rests in misery.”

— Michael Finkel

70. “Jefferies wrote, in his autobiography The Story of My Heart, that the type of life celebrated by society, one of hard work and unceasing chores and constant routine, does nothing but “build a wall about the mind.”

— Michael Finkel

71. “Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.”

— Michael Finkel

72. “Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can’t dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here’s.”

— Michael Finkel

73. “Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a “particular originality of thought” that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture or discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed.”

— Michael Finkel

74. “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

75. “Even Henry David Thoreau, not known for kvetching, wrote in The Maine Woods that he was “seriously molested” by bugs.”

— Michael Finkel

76. “I like being alone. My preferred exercise is solo long-distance running, and my job, as a journalist and writer, is often asocial. When life becomes overwhelming, my first thought – my fantasy – is to head for the woods.”

— Michael Finkel

77. “This loss of self was precisely what Knight experienced in the forest. In public, one always wears a social mask, a presentation to the world. Even when you’re alone and look in a mirror, you’re acting, which is one reason Knight never kept a mirror in his camp. He let go of all artifice; he became no one and everyone.”

— Michael Finkel

78. “Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is.”

— Michael Finkel

79. “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.”

— Michael Finkel

80. “He never bothered listening to sports; the bored him, every one of them.”

— Michael Finkel

81. “The Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti has been quoted as saying, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

— Michael Finkel

82. “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer.”

— Michael Finkel

83. “These hermits often wonder how the rest of the world can be so blind, not to notice what we’re doing to ourselves. “I have become solitary,” wrote the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men.”

— Michael Finkel

84. “One becomes free, Socrates seems to have taught, not by fulfilling all desires but by eliminating desire.”

— Michael Finkel

85. “Fighting against everything, he may have realized, only makes one’s life infinitely harder. He has seen the bottomless nonsense of our world and has decided, like most of us, to simply try to tolerate it. He appears to have surrendered. It is rational, yet heartbreaking.”

— Michael Finkel

86. “Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a “particular originality of thought” that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture or discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeared happiest when alone. The word “autism” is derived from autos, the Greek word for “self.”

— Michael Finkel

87. “The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do,” wrote Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who died in 1968. “In fact, he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both dangerous and despised.”

— Michael Finkel

88. “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

89. “Across much of Chinese history, it was customary to protest a corrupt emperor by leaving society and moving into the mountainous interior of the country. People who withdrew often came from the upper classes and were highly educated. Hermit.”

— Michael Finkel

90. “Brazilian government provided him with a thirty-one-square-mile region of rain forest. The land is off-limits to everyone except this man.”

— Michael Finkel

91. “We didn’t feel the need to communicate everything all the time,” Chris continued. “We’re not emotionally bleeding all over each other. We’re not touchy-feely.”

— Michael Finkel

92. “Knight felt his chest clench with melancholy. How had his life come to this? He occasionally missed his family. ‘I suppose a more subtle answer would be, I missed some of my family to a certain degree,’ he allowed.”

— Michael Finkel

93. “The chief problem with environmental noise one can’t control is that it’s impossible to ignore. The human body is designed to react to it.”

— Michael Finkel

94. “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.”

— Michael Finkel

95. “Gradually, methodically, he shed most of his anxiety. But not all. Being too relaxed, he felt, was also a danger. In appropriate doses, worry was useful, possibly lifesaving. “I used worry to encourage thought,” he said. “Worry can give you an extra prod to survive and plan. And I had to plan.”

— Michael Finkel

96. “Japanese researchers at Chiba University found that a daily fifteen-minute walk in the woods caused significant decreases in cortisol, along with a modest drop in blood pressure and heart rate. Physiologists believe our bodies relax in hushed natural surroundings because we evolved there; our senses matured in grasslands and woods, and remain calibrated to them. A.”

— Michael Finkel

97. “Knight, of course, felt that anyone’s willing assistance tainted the whole thing. Either you are hidden or you’re not, no middle ground. He wished to be unconditionally alone, exiled to an island of his own creation, an uncontacted tribe of one.”

— Michael Finkel

98. “He’s a genius with my Prius,” says the co-owner of Left Bank Books, the town’s independent bookstore. The.”

— Michael Finkel

99. “Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don’t think. It’s like there’s no atheists in a foxhole. Same with negative twenty. That’s when you do have religion. You do pray. You pray for warmth.”

— Michael Finkel

100. “He wondered if modern society, with its flood of information and tempest of noise, was only making us dumber.”

— Michael Finkel