Eric Hoffer

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of

— Eric Hoffer

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action --the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

— Eric Hoffer

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

— Eric Hoffer

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

— Eric Hoffer

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.

— Eric Hoffer

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

— Eric Hoffer

Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

— Eric Hoffer

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

— Eric Hoffer

To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

— Eric Hoffer

Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.

— Eric Hoffer

The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

— Eric Hoffer

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

— Eric Hoffer

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 is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.

— Eric Hoffer

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.

— Eric Hoffer

When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.

— Eric Hoffer

When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

— Eric Hoffer

There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.

— Eric Hoffer

Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.

— Eric Hoffer

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

— Eric Hoffer

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

— Eric Hoffer

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

— Eric Hoffer

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

— Eric Hoffer

What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?

— Eric Hoffer

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

— Eric Hoffer

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.

— Eric Hoffer

Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.

— Eric Hoffer

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

— Eric Hoffer

It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.

— Eric Hoffer

The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.

— Eric Hoffer

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy -- the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

— Eric Hoffer

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

— Eric Hoffer

The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.

— Eric Hoffer

Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.

— Eric Hoffer

The beginning of thought is in disagreement -- not only with others but also with ourselves.

— Eric Hoffer

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.

— Eric Hoffer

We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.

— Eric Hoffer

We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.

— Eric Hoffer

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

— Eric Hoffer

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

— Eric Hoffer

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

— Eric Hoffer

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

— Eric Hoffer

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

— Eric Hoffer

The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

— Eric Hoffer

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

— Eric Hoffer

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 to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.

— Eric Hoffer

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

— Eric Hoffer

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

— Eric Hoffer

Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.

— Eric Hoffer

Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.

— Eric Hoffer

The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.

— Eric Hoffer

Fear of becoming a has been keeps some people from becoming anything.

— Eric Hoffer

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter unworthiness can be a source of courage.

— Eric Hoffer

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

— Eric Hoffer

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

— Eric Hoffer

Friendship Never explain -- your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe it anyway. A real friend never gets in your way, unless you happen to be on the way down. A friend is someone you can do nothing with and enjoy it. However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

— Eric Hoffer

However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

— Eric Hoffer

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

— Eric Hoffer

We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.

— Eric Hoffer

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.

— Eric Hoffer

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.

— Eric Hoffer

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 God who obeys his own laws.

— Eric Hoffer

A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.

— Eric Hoffer

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

— Eric Hoffer

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

— Eric Hoffer

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

— Eric Hoffer

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

— Eric Hoffer

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

— Eric Hoffer

Man was nature's mistake --she neglected to finish him -- and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

— Eric Hoffer

Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.

— Eric Hoffer

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

— Eric Hoffer

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

— Eric Hoffer

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations --past and present --are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.

— Eric Hoffer

It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.

— Eric Hoffer

Intolerance is the Do Not Touch sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having our hair ruffled, but we will not tolerate any familiarity with the toupee which covers our baldness.

— Eric Hoffer

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 we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.

— Eric Hoffer

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

— Eric Hoffer

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

— Eric Hoffer

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

— Eric Hoffer

The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.

— Eric Hoffer

There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.

— Eric Hoffer

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.

— Eric Hoffer

Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.

— Eric Hoffer

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 from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.

— Eric Hoffer

The real antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

— Eric Hoffer

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

— Eric Hoffer

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

— Eric Hoffer

When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.

— Eric Hoffer

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 polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

— Eric Hoffer

Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.

— Eric Hoffer

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, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.

— Eric Hoffer

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 uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.

— Eric Hoffer

A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.

— Eric Hoffer

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

— Eric Hoffer

The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning.

— Eric Hoffer

To the old, the new is usually bad news.

— Eric Hoffer

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.

— Eric Hoffer

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.

— Eric Hoffer

It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.

— Eric Hoffer

It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

— Eric Hoffer

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.

— Eric Hoffer