When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes.… — 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
Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears,… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and… — 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
Take man's most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished...Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin. We think him more a… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature,… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes.… — Eric Hoffer Copy Share Image
The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art… — 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
