Eric Hoffer Quotes

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

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.

Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.

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

The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.

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

Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance - a flailing of the arms to to regain one's balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.

The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.

There is a radicalism in all getting, and a conservatism in all keeping. Lovemaking is radical, while marriage is conservative.

First something is a great idea, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business and finally it becomes a racket.

The purpose of philosophers is to show people what is right under their noses.

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.

It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.

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

In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.

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 lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.

One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure

However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.

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

There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives.

Passionate intensity may serve as a substitute for confidence.

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

Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.

It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.

All prayers and hopes are a reaching-out for coincidences.

There is a time when the word "eventually" has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.

When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

To be aware how fruitful the playful mood can be is to be immune to the propaganda of the alienated, which extols resentment as a fuel of achievement.

Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.

The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.

The well-adjusted make poor prophets.

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

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.

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.

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

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

It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.

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

It is startling to see how the oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.

Those who feel guilty are afraid; and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement.

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.

It is a strange thing that both the injurer and the injured, the sinner and he who is sinned against, should find in the mass movement an escape from a blemished life.

Resistance, whether to one's appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character.

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

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

I always held my flower in a clenched fist.

Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.