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About this quote

What does it mean?
Hoffer values intellectual isolation, viewing thinking as a personal process like digestion that others cannot help with.
In plain terms
Thinking is solitary; others cannot help you think.
What can you take from it?
True thinking requires solitude and self-reliance.

Where it applies

  • deep work
  • study
  • personal development

Putting it to work

  • work alone
  • trust your mind
  • avoid distractions

Questions to consider

  • When do you think best?
  • Who influences your thoughts?

Another view

Collaboration often accelerates insight and avoids bias.

More from Eric Hoffer

  1. To think for oneself is not only, as Gide said, counterrevolutionary but also apostasy and, at certain times, treason.

    Permalink to quote #130
  2. The most important point is - and remains - not to take oneself seriously. There is no past, and, certainly, no future. There are but a few years - ten at the …

    Permalink to quote #132
  3. Thinking with me is like looking for a person whose address I don't know. I stand on a street corner all day long waiting for him to pass by. Certainly there a…

    Permalink to quote #129

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