His yearning for new and faraway places, his desire for freedom, relief and oblivion was as he admitted to himself, an urge to flee-an urge to get away from his work, from the everyday site of a cold, rigid, and passionate servitude.

My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence.

All this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.

He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.

"(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")"

He did not often think of people as individuals, but rather as antidotes for the poison of his loneliness, as escapes from the imprisoned ghosts.

He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.

What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.

But it was a mental thing. He had gotten depressed thinking about how they hadn't found him yet, and when he was busy and had something to do the depression seemed to leave.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

Flight, Escape: that in fact was Plato's dictum regarding the soul that acknowledges in itself a principle superior to the world. Plotinus, in his turn, recommended to his disciple the "flight of the alone to the Alone", and then Porphyry expiates on the setting free and the withdrawal of the soul. The same terms may be encountered in the religious philosophies of India.[…] With the Buddhist, too, it is the same act of negation, whether he denies the existence of the world or believes in the reality of his present wretchedness; and he who practises charity to a degree that sometimes reaches the sublime in the last resort relinquishes even that. Asanga, the great mystical doctor of the Mahâyâna, when he starts to map out the path of his bodhisattva's ascent from "world" to "world" until he reaches the very highest state, which is that of Nirvâna, as a matter of course describes it as a whole series of evasions: niryàna; so much so that it has been said that Buddhism's only God is Escape.

He was suffering from self-love, a chief cure for which is the practice of love for others.

My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.

To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.