Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy…
• Communists are frustrated capitalists.
• Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
• Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute for the one thing we really want and cannot have.
• There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on…
• The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft.
• Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.
• The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.
• Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.
• There is nothing more explosive than a skilled population condemned to inaction. Such a population is likely to become a hotbed of extremism and intolerance,…
• In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.
• Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.
• The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly…
• When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the…
• Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.
• Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
• We can never have enough of that which we do not want.
• Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.
• We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
• Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.

Browse Eric Hoffer Quotes by Category