All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)
The idea that the root of human misery might be so simple—and so easily ignored—feels almost absurd. In an age where distractions are infinite and solitude is marketed as a problem in need of fixing, Pascal’s 17th-century insight cuts clean through time to strike the modern nerve.
Pascal, a philosopher, physicist, and man of faith, was not afraid of silence. Nor of God. He saw in the quiet room a mirror. Not merely a space of absence, but a presence—a reckoning. To sit in stillness, without distraction or agenda, is to be confronted with the self. And for many, that is unbearable.
The human spirit seems to resist solitude. We fill our lives with movement, conversation, television, scrolling, even the nobility of "being busy"—not always because these things matter, but because they spare us the confrontation with our own interior life. The still room is too loud with our unspoken questions: Am I loved? Am I enough? Am I avoiding something I must face?
And yet, Scripture speaks into this with a quiet but persistent voice: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). Stillness isn’t just rest; it’s revelation. It's where we remember who we are—not as consumers or performers, but as souls. The quiet room isn’t empty. It’s where God often waits.
When I was young, silence meant punishment. It was what lingered after arguments, or hung in the air at funerals. As I grew older, I began to see silence not as a void, but as a sanctuary. In moments of loss, of awe, of love too deep for words, silence became a form of prayer. Sitting alone, I could hear not just my thoughts, but something deeper—something eternal.
I think of the monastics who made their homes in deserts and caves. Were they running from the world? Or were they running toward something it so easily drowns out? To sit in a quiet room alone is to discover the subtle music of the soul, which is so easily silenced by the world’s noise. The still, small voice of God is not heard at the volume of TikTok or talk shows.
In our hyperconnected world, loneliness is feared, but solitude is sacred. The former is a hunger; the latter is a feast. But few ever learn the difference. We resist the quiet because it requires courage—courage to face our regrets, our mortality, our longings. And yet in doing so, we make peace with the self, and perhaps more profoundly, with God.
There’s a reason Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray. Not because he feared people, but because he needed the voice that came only in the stillness. If the Son of Man needed solitude, how much more do we?
So perhaps Pascal was right. Misery begins when we cannot endure our own company, when we fear being unmasked by silence. But healing begins there too. In the quiet room. Alone, but not abandoned.
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