Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• 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,…
• Imitation is often a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability or the time to work out an independent…
• That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.
• We are made kind by being kind.
• It is a juvenile notion that a society needs a lofty purpose and a shining vision to achieve much. Both in the market place and…
• The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.
• 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…
• Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success
• It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.
• The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises…
• There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.
• Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot…
• The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human…
• All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
• We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
• Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a…
• The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.
• Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man…
• The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they…
• A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

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