Eric Hoffer Quotes

It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.

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

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

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

Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.

Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.

Rudeness is a weak persons imitation of strength.

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

Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.

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

We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

We probably have a greater love for those we support than for those who support us. Our vanity carries more weight than our self-interest.

No one has a right to happiness.

However much we guard against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing.

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

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

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

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what 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 best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.

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

The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ.

Children are the keys of paradise.

Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs.

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.

It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.

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

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.

In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.

We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

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

Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.

A person's creative ability decreases in direct proportion to the degree to which he takes himself seriously.

Rudeness luxuriates in the absence of self-respect.

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

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.

Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.

To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him

The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.

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

Spiritual stagnation ensues when man's environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.

A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.

Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.

We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.

The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

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

If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

Far more critical than what we know or what we don't know is what we don't want to know.

Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.

Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.

What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.

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

Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.

The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole
the church, party, nation
and not to his fellow true believer.

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.

Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have something worth fighting for,they do not feel like fighting.

The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.

Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.

Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

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

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

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

A man's worth is what he is divided by what he thinks he is.

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

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

America is still the best country for the common man
white or black ... if he can't make it here he won't make it anywhere else.

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

It needs some intelligence to be truly selfish. The unintelligent can only be self-righteous.

When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.

A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.

Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

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

What Pascal said of an effective religion is true of any effective doctrine: it must be contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.

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

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.

Successful action tends to become an end in itself.

You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone

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