Eric Hoffer Quotes

Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.

You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

I think about dying. I've come to realize we all die alone in one way or another.

All my friends, they're all gone. I've outlived them all.

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.

Feeling funny in my mind, Lord I believe I'm fixing to die Well, I don't mind dying But I hate to leave my children crying Well, I look over yonder to that burying ground Look over yonder to that burying ground Sure seems lonesome, Lord, when the sun goes down

All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you'll die, and you'll probably be alone.

THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to.

You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!

L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.

So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.

An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.

Death is the room that is always empty.

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

It's a sad world we live in when a human being leaves so little of a mark that no one even realizes it when he's gone

Death is loneliness in its purest form.

Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless.

The world seems a lonesome place when mother has passed away and only memories of her are left.

Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It's just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we're left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.