The majority prove their worth by keeping busy. A busy life is the nearest thing to a purposeful life.
Eric HofferIn the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.
Eric HofferPeople in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
Eric HofferOur achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts.
Eric HofferMan is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Eric HofferThe birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning.
Eric Hoffer