By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.
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
Putting it to work
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
To think for oneself is not only, as Gide said, counterrevolutionary but also apostasy and, at certain times, treason.
Permalink to quote #130 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 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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