It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.
Interpretation
The inability to appreciate the living signifies a decline in one's spirit and vitality.
Eric Hoffer's quote suggests that when we find ourselves unable to express admiration or appreciation for the vitality of those around us, it reflects a deeper issue within ourselves. This 'creeping inner death' indicates a stagnation of the spirit, where negativity or apathy takes root, preventing us from recognizing the beauty and life that exists in the world and within others.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing life and positivity.
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.
Death smells like homemade apple sauce as it cooks on the stove. It is not the strangling sense of illness. It is not fear. It is freedom.
To see a man fearless in dangers, untainted with lusts, happy in adversity, composed in a tumult, and laughing at all those things which are generally either coveted or feared, all men must acknowledge that this can be from nothing else but a beam of divinity that influences a mortal body.
If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe - all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary - evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe - just maybe - if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover.
The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.
And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.
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