Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.
• Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.
• 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.
• A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
• Help your sister's boat across the water, and yours too will reach the other side. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind…
• 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…
• In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.
• Creativity is discontent translated into arts.
• The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unobtainable, envy takes the place of greed.
• There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
• We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as…
• Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.
• It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
• Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.
• Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.
• Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.
• 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…
• 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…
• The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.

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