Eric Hoffer Quotes

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts.

Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft.

We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.

It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.

One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.

The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.

It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

Children are the keys of paradise.

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.

The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.

Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.

In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them

It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.

Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.

There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.

The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

Intolerance is the ''Do Not Touch'' sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having our hair ruffled, but we will not tolerate any familiarity with the toupee which covers our baldness.

Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

The education explosion is producing a vast number of people who want to live significant, important lives but lack the ability to satisfy this craving for importance by individual achievement. The country is being swamped with nobodies who want to be somebodies.

Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.