Eric Hoffer Quotes

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

Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.

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.

Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute for the one thing we really want and cannot have.

A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.

A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.

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

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

When the Greeks said, Whom the gods love die young, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.

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.

Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.

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

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

Nature attains perfection, but man never does.

The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.

All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.

That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and exhilaration.

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

Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

Faith is primarily a process of identification; the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal.

A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.

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

To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.

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

When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.

Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.

There is no alienation that a little power will not cure.

In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.

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.

...That genius is a rare exception (:) It's not true. Talent and genius have been wasted on enormous scale throughout our history; this is all I know for sure.

It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

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

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

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

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power - power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.

Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.

There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

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

The craving to change the world is perhaps a reflection of the craving to change ourselves.

The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.

The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.

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.