Best Eric Hoffer Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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