Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.

The true Renaissance person is endowed with panoramic attention.... The habit of noticing the ensemble of everything and its constituent parts is a matter of will, not of innate aptitude. It involves the conscious noticing of things and the gaps that separate and connect them.

You__e got to stop thinking of consciousness as your own. You__e only thinking for yourself when you are by yourself. As soon as you are in the presence of others, your consciousness is linked at some level to those others.

Awareness is Brahman. The absolute cosmic consciousness. When you are aware, you are connected with Brahman.

The history of your happiness is the history of your feeling connected.

I have often wished in vain,' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.''That,' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us.