Eric Hoffer Quotes (210 Quotes)

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.

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

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

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

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.

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 main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

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

I wasn't worried about typecasting - I thought I'd figure that out down the road. I figured that, with the quality of the show, Will was going to be my epitaph. It was more about Is this the one character I want beside my name for the rest of eternity

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

To the intellectual, America's unforgivable sin is that it has revolutions without revolutionaries, and achieves the momentous in a matter-of-fact way

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.

Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.

No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not

It is not the wickedness of the old regime the masses rise against but its weakness.

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else we are the busiest people in the world.

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.

It is easier to love humanity than to love your neighbor

It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are.... Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware ... still clinging to things that no longer exist.

Naivete in grownups is often charming but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.

To the old, the new is usually bad news.

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

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.

To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.

Capitalism is at its liberating best in a non-capitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.

The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.