“Peu d’hommes s’aperçoivent de ce qu’est la solitude, et jusqu’où elle s’étend ; car une foule n’est pas une compagnie, et des visages ne sont qu’une galerie de portraits, et la conversation une cymbale résonnante, là où il n’y a point d’amour.”

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) – De L’amitié

« […] little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: Magna civitas, magna solitudo; because in a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity. »