“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
Permalink: Henry David Thoreau
About this quote
Thoreau kept three chairs in his cabin at Walden Pond and explains what each was for, and the joke is also a scale: a person can hold a certain number of others close. It is the most useful small sentence ever written about how much intimacy a life can actually carry.
Source: Walden