Eric Hoffer Quotes

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

What good is sitting all alone in your room?

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening.

Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.

As I walk'd by myself, I talk'd to myself, And myself replied to me; And the questions myself then put to myself, With their answers I give to thee.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

I want to know what you're thinking, you want to know what I'm thinking. But we're alone. In our own minds. We're trapped in this sort of isolation.

The most important conversations, briefings, meeting, and lectures you will ever have will be those you hold with yourself in the privacy of your own mind.

I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you look up and realize that you're one of those people you see on the train talking to themselves?

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

I've led a very isolated existence since I was 6 years old. It's kind of been me and my mind.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

I'm self-entertaining. My dialogue is with myself.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.