« All Man Quotes · Eric Hoffer's Page
Man Quotes by Eric Hoffer
- Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.
- Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.
- The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than…
- 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…
- 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…
- A man by himself is in bad company.
- To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful…
- Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine,…
- There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire…
- A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,
- The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a…
- Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.
- To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man…
- Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. For we can win a man's…
- Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter.…
More Man Quotes
- Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in… — Hannah Arendt
- At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. — Aristotle
- For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does… — Aristotle
- A man can die but once. — William Shakespeare
- Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his… — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake. — Aristotle
- The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances. — Aristotle
- No one loves the man whom he fears. — Aristotle