Eric Hoffer Quotes (210 Quotes)

The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.

The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.

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

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

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

We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate.

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

We can never have enough of that which we really do not want.

The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

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

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.

There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.

Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth

It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.

The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.

Children are the keys of paradise.

It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something that they are showing the way when they are running away that they see the light when they feel the heat that they are chosen when they are shunned.

It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.

Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

A man by himself is in bad company.

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.

Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.

In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations past and present are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.

In the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.

The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.

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.

There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.