Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The majority prove their worth by keeping busy. A busy life is the nearest thing to a purposeful life. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills,… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
In man's life, the absence of an essential component usually leads to the adoption of a substitute. The substitute is usually embraced… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
“Passionate hatreds can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. These people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life. It not infrequently happens that those who hunger for hope give… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
To be ruthless requires belief that our life on earth is but a brief prelude to an afterlife, or a temporary sacrifice… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new;… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction and between profession and practice - that is to say with a… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
“In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others. The impression somehow prevails that the… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
A nation without dregs and malcontents, is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
