Top 100 The Hermit Quotes
#1. The Hermit is an important tarot card with much to tell us, but he tends not to be so welcome around the bonfire.
Thomm Quackenbush
#2. The Hermit was known to be pretty sniffy about disciples who returned in failure. There was a wall of the institute layered with their skins- an ingenious display that encouraged vigor in his students, as well as nicely keeping out the drafts.
Jonathan Stroud
#3. He couldn't help but wonder if Moses Levy had experienced this same heat, if true images burned their maker. He wondered, too, if the hermit at that riverside was right, if there wasn't some element of capturing a soul in each photograph, if he wasn't responsible for those whose images he caught.
Alice Hoffman
#4. Hush! With sudden gush As from a fountain sings in yonder bush The Hermit Thrush.
John B. Tabb
#5. The hermit said, 'This is the way to be strong: when temptations start to speak in your mind do not answer them but get up, pray, do penance, and say "Son of God, have mercy upon me."
Benedicta Ward
#6. I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,
if there were not a friend?
The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. Daughter," said the Hermit, "I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never met any such thing as Luck.
C.S. Lewis
#8. {Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.
Norman Lock
#9. Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us.
Henry David Thoreau
#10. ... struck. Once. And into that blow he put his childhood, his grief, his loss. He put his mother's sorrow and his sister's longing. The menorah, weighed down with that, crushed the Hermit's skull.
Louise Penny
#11. The hermit Anthony once told me that a monk is like a fish: take him out of his element and he dies. Silence is his element. In silence you can trade this shoddy world for Heaven.
Gillian Bradshaw
#12. The man of earth is the adherent. The lover giveth his life unto the work among men. The hermit goeth solitary, and giveth only of his light unto men.
Aleister Crowley
#13. Nowadays, people are so jeezled up. If they took some chamomile tea and spent more time rocking on the porch in the evening listening to the liquid song of the hermit thrush, they might enjoy life more.
Tasha Tudor
#14. Karen told me about an old woman who was the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands. She was the only one left who could speak her tribe's language, but the anthropologists didn't realize it and never bothered to learn it from her. When the old woman died, the language died with her.
Jerzy Kosinski
#15. Loneliness - since I was trying to escape it - was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.
Kobo Abe
#16. No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
Hannah
#17. And the hermit's spirit detaches itself, ever so gently, and begins its lonely passage upward, to find its final resting place among the stars.
Eleanor Catton
#18. Politicians need religion even more than a hermit in retreat. If the hermit acts inspired by bad motivation, he'll harm only himself. But if a politician, who can directly influence an entire society, acts with bad motivation, a large number of people will experience the negative consequences.
Dalai Lama XIV
#19. I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here,
Edgar Allan Poe
#20. Wisdom can see the red, the rose, the stained and sculptured curve of grey, the charcoal scars of fire, and see around that living tower of tree the hermit tatters of old bark split down and strip to end the season; and can be quiet and not look for reasons past the edge of reason.
Judith Wright
#21. The hermit is he who needs a friend, and in the absence of a community has befriended himself.
Anthony Marais
#22. I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.
John Darnielle
#23. Further north, I met a Siberian hermit who lived in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. His life's passion was wrestling black bears ... in the nude (him not the bears). He did not know why he did it. All the hermit knew was that if he stopped wrestling bears, he would die.
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
#24. Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the
settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat!
Walt Whitman
#25. The hermit, without access to the news of the day, owes it to himself to be up to date on the doings of ancient Rome.
Sylvain Tesson
#26. And from the phlox and mignonette Rich attars drift on every hand; And when star-vestured twilight comes The pale moths weave a saraband. And crickets in the aisles of grass With their clear fifing pierce the hush; And somewhere you many hear anear The passion of the hermit thrush.
Clinton Scollard
#27. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#28. Something of the hermit's temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.
Bertrand Russell
#29. I aint drinkin after no mule, said the hermit. Have you not got no old bucket nor nothin?
Cormac McCarthy
#30. I don't socialize. I'm kind of a hermit. The life of an actor can be very lonely.
Peter Dinklage
#31. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
#32. The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice.
Richard Bach
#33. The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness. That might sound selfish, but it's not. Only a sociopath or a hermit can find happiness through extreme selfishness. A normal person needs to treat others well in order to enjoy life.
Scott Adams
#34. He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.
Jon Krakauer
#35. I, who so love a hermit life for a good part of the day, find myself living in public, and almost losing my identity.
Elizabeth Blackwell
#36. The trouble with glossy magazines is that they tend to be stuffed with articles about handbag designers - the sort of women who, with their perfectly styled lives, immaculate houses, and adoring partners, make you want to become a hermit.
Kate Reardon
#37. It was supposedly a scorching hot summer, but since I'm such a hermit, I really didn't notice. In fact, the last time I went to the beach was almost ten years ago.
Kyousuke Motomi
#38. I'm like a hermit. Once I'm home, I'm home and when I ride in the car, I don't really listen to the radio as much.
Joanna Noelle Levesque
#39. My roommate is a 240-pound homicidal hermit. For dinner he's fixing me a dead fox he scraped off the highway near Ponchatoula, and after that we're taking a leaky tin boat out on a windy lake to spy on some semi-retarded fishermen. Don't you wish you were here?
Carl Hiaasen
#40. Hollywood's two polar types are the cynically drunken writer aggressively nursing a ten-year-old reputation and the theatrically self-conscious hermit who strides the boulevard in sandals, home-made shorts and a prophetic beard, muttering against the Age of the Machines.
Christopher Isherwood
#41. Gonzo, the enlightened hippy-biker island god, was a hermit in every sense of the word; a hermit crab and this island was his shell.
Jonathan Dunne
#42. Reading from St. John Chrysostom that the life of a bishop should be more perfect than the life of a hermit. The reason he gave was that the holiness which the monk preserves in the desert must be preserved by the bishop into the midst of the evil of the world.
Fulton J. Sheen
#43. I hate you, I thought, I hate you with your bloody nature-boy airs and your bloody forced-march voyage of bloody discovery. I wondered then if Finn's personality worked on everyone, or whether I had just the the right sort of mentality to fall in step with a self-centered hermit-boy crab murderer.
Meg Rosoff
#44. Man, I'm just into Buddhism, and I'm at peace with the fact that me, as this person, probably gonna not be around. Think about a hermit crab, okay? And it's a shell. It's like, they go from one shell to the next. And that's what I am. I'm just a hermit crab changin' shells.
Danny McBride
#45. Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.
Zack Love
#46. Magnificent autumn! He comes not like a pilgrim, clad in russet weeds; not like a hermit, clad in gray; but like a warrior with the stain of blood in his brazen mail.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#47. Monday nights always brought in the worst kind of crazy. Tonight that crazy came in the form of Paul Cross, town hermit. One of them, anyway. This was the Pacific Northwest.
Tara Kelly
#48. Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
Thomas Merton
#49. Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality.
Charles Phillips
#50. Jade blinked. It was only for a fraction of a second but she could have sworn the the house had changed shape.
Richard J. Ward
#51. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads;
Herman Melville
#52. The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.
Henry David Thoreau
#53. Jared is about as revealing as a hermit crab. He's like one of those piggy banks that you have to break to get anything out of. You can't just shake him and he'll give up the goods. You have to get the hammer.
Penelope Douglas
#54. I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me.
David Grubbs
#55. Yes, I'm a hermit. Mostly I brood," Mad Rogan said. "Also, I'm very good at wallowing in self-pity. I spend my days steeped in melancholy, looking out the window. Occasionally a single tear quietly rolls down my cheek.
Ilona Andrews
#57. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#58. Being a hermit involves a lot of what we would call routine tasks taken to an extreme, even the morning flush of the toilet becomes a ritual.
Steve Merrick
#59. 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.
Terry Pratchett
#60. Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.
Rebecca Solnit
#61. It doesn't seem too unusual to have a live hermit crab here in Atlantic City, but when you think I brought it all the way from Texas, it's unusual.
Phyllis George
#62. I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#63. It's quite simple, they poisoned it with smoke, chemicals and pollution from factories and cars, and power stations. Silly humans knew what they were doing, but carried on poisoning the planet anyway.
Richard J. Ward
#64. Etiquette is all human social behavior. If you're a hermit on a mountain, you don't have to worry about etiquette; if somebody comes up the mountain, then you've got a problem. It matters because we want to live in reasonably harmonious communities.
Judith Martin
#65. This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.
Pete Seeger
#66. Gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone.
Gail Caldwell
#67. 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
#68. Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.
Douglas Coupland
#70. If performance of duty is part of excellence, then it should give satisfaction and happiness.
Anuj Bajaj
#71. 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.
Donald Kingsbury
#72. You know that book 'Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking', by Susan Cain? That's like my manifesto. The older I get, the more I think I could be a hermit.
Jessica Raine
#73. My husband says this longing for isolation is not a good quality, that if I wanted to be a hermit I should have moved to the West Coast and adopted a lot of cats, not gotten married and had children that demand to be fed several times a day.
Anna White
#74. In eighteenth-century England, there was a practice of hiring a picturesque hermit who would inhabit the beautiful ruin on your estate. To me it rhymes with certain kinds of pop-music entertainers and eccentrics - both touted and tolerated.
David Grubbs
#75. [ ... ]And his head is on fire with new things[ ... ]he called himself the little blue hermit, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever.
Terry Pratchett
#76. If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
Jean Cocteau
#77. The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
James Russell Lowell
#78. Lissa knelt down, compassion on her face. I wasn't surprised, since she'd always had a thing for animals. She'd lectured me for days after I'd instigated the infamous hamster-and-hermit-crab fight. I'd viewed the fight as a testing of worthy opponents. She'd seen it as animal cruelty.
Richelle Mead
#79. A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.
Dean Koontz
#80. Every once in the while I'll watch 'Duck Dynasty' and 'Kim & Kourtney Take Miami,' but outside of that, I don't really watch TV. Also, I don't text anybody, I'm hardly on Twitter or Instagram, and I'm very closed off. I'm kind of a hermit.
Israel Broussard
#81. A hermit is one who renounces the world of fragments that he may enjoy the world wholly and without interruption.
Khalil Gibran
#82. I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.
Henry David Thoreau
#83. Symbols
A storm-beaten old watch-tower,
A blind hermit rings the hour.
All-destroying sword-blade still
Carried by the wandering fool.
Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
Beauty and fool together laid.
W.B.Yeats
#84. You can't find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing.
Terry Pratchett
#85. I'm not a hermit, but I definitely stay in a lot more than I used to. There's more attention now then there ever was. You walk down the street with someone and it's a story. It becomes national news, you know what I mean? So, I still do things, but I stay home a lot more.
Derek Jeter
#86. I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.
Laurence Sterne
#87. The biggest problem I have doing my acting is having to interact with other people. I think if it wasn't for my wife and my kids, I'd probably be a hermit.
John Gordon Sinclair
#88. The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
Iris Murdoch
#89. I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man's puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one.
Robertson Davies
#90. A hermit said, "Do not judge an adulterer if you are chaste or you will break the law of God just as much as he does. For he who said 'Do not commit adultery' also said 'Do not judge.
Rowan Williams
#91. Today he told Erec "Fun is for having. It is the one thing that is forever." Erec agreed.
Kaza Kingsley
#92. This individual must focus on idealistic callings and activities that uplift others, cultivating faith and spirituality. This is the Mystic, Hermit, Visionary, and Intuitive.
Celeste Teal
#93. My dad loved to 'arrange things' to take us kids to that scared the crap out of us on Halloween. He'd take us to the old 'Hermit's House' at the edge of town. He'd park the car 100 yards down the street and say, 'Go back there and get something off the front porch!'
Bill Moseley
#94. 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.
Margaret Atwood
#95. A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope. Introverts can be these things, but most are perfectly friendly.
Susan Cain
#96. You really know how to make a person sound like a hermit."
"If the sagging spot on the couch fits.
Ottilie Weber
#97. I left home and tried to live the life of a hermit, but I was still fighting myself. I went to England and worked as a chainman on the road. It was better therapy than the shrinks. Building a two-mile road gave me internal peace.
Brian Strang
#99. Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup?
Anne Sexton
#100. Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.
Ryokan
