Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.
• When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition…
• In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.
• Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.
• Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something…
• You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for…
• However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
• We see through others only when we see through ourselves.
• One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never…
• A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and…
• When the Greeks said, Whom the gods love die young, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young…
• It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral…
• What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?
• The purpose of philosophers is to show people what is right under their noses.
• The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
• People haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also…
• A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
• To learn you need a certain degree of confidence, not too much and not too little. If you have too little confidence, you will think…
• Give people pride and they'll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters, and even die for them. Self-surrender is a transaction of barter: we…
• ...That genius is a rare exception (:) It's not true. Talent and genius have been wasted on enormous scale throughout our history; this is all…

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