Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter IV, Part 9, The Grand Dynamic of History, p. 209
Context: In an age which no longer waits patiently through this life for the rewards of the next, it is a crushing spiritual blow to lose one's sense of participation in mankind's journey, and to see only a huge milling-around, a collective living-out of lives with no larger purpose than the days which each accumulates. When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it. If we are to meet, endure, and transcend the trials and defeats of the future — for trials and defeats there are certain to be — it can only be from a point of view which, seeing the future as part of the sweep of history, enables us to establish our place in that immense procession in which is incorporated whatever hope humankind may have.
“Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do.”
Entry (1955)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
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Eric Hoffer 240
American philosopher 1898–1983Related quotes
Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 80

Source: Lectures on Philosophy (1959), p. 90

Source: All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day

From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004