Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than…
• It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.
• Fair play is primarily not blaming others for anything that is wrong with us.
• Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty…
• A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic…
• In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into…
• For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in…
• Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.
• Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self…
• The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will…
• Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.
• How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!
• To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our…
• It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no…
• People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
• Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.
• There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from…
• We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that…
• A man by himself is in bad company.
• The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

Browse Eric Hoffer Quotes by Category