Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Spiritual growth stops when the outside world is chaotic or when the inside world is too rigid.
In plain terms
Stagnation happens when life is too chaotic or too predictable.
What can you take from it?
Balance between challenge and routine fuels spiritual growth.

Where it applies

  • personal development
  • monastic life
  • daily routines

Putting it to work

  • seek healthy challenges
  • avoid extreme routines
  • embrace uncertainty

Questions to consider

  • How much change is too much?
  • Does routine kill creativity?

Another view

Predictability can also provide necessary stability.

More from Eric Hoffer

  1. Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the reject…

    Permalink to quote #190
  2. Take man's most fantastic invention - God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that ima…

    Permalink to quote #192
  3. Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from w…

    Permalink to quote #189

Related quotes

  1. Every one, though born of God in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees.

    John WesleyJohn Wesley quote #4
  2. As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

    Henry van DykeHenry van Dyke quote #36
  3. In our desire for eternal life we pray for an eternity of our habit and comfort, forgetting that immortality is in repeatedly transcending the definite forms o…

    Rabindranath TagoreRabindranath Tagore quote #79