Eric Hoffer Quotes

396 Sourced Quotes

Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

Eric Hoffer
When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.

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

Eric Hoffer
Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.

Eric Hoffer
As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words — two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas — a series of ideas stuck together.

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

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

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.
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

Eric Hoffer
To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

Eric Hoffer
We can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and... we run fastest and farthest from ourselves.

Eric Hoffer
The most important point is — and remains — not to take oneself seriously. There is no past, and, certainly, no future. There are but a few years — ten at the most. You pass your days as best you can, doing as little harm as possible. Let the desires be few and treat expectations as weeds. You read, scribble as the spirit moves you, hear some new music, see every week the few people you are attached to. Again: guard yourself, above all, against self-dramatization, a feeling of importance, and the sprouting of expectations.

Eric Hoffer
Pride is a sense of worth derived from something that is not organically part of us, while self-esteem derives from the potentialities and achievements of the self. We are proud when we identify ourselves with an imaginary self, a leader, a holy cause, a collective body or possessions. There is fear and intolerance in pride; it is sensitive and uncompromising. The less promise and potency in the self, the more imperative is the need for pride. The core of pride is self-rejection.
It is true that when pride releases energies and serves as a spur to achievement, it can lead to a reconciliation with the self and the attainment of genuine self-esteem.

Eric Hoffer
Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints.

Eric Hoffer
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

Eric Hoffer
Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.

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

Eric Hoffer
A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.

Eric Hoffer
We take for granted the need to escape the self. Yet the self can also be a refuge. In totalitarian countries the great hunger is for private life. Absorption in the minutiae of an individual existence is the only refuge from the apocalyptic madhouse staged by maniacal saviors of humanity.

Eric Hoffer
Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication in the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves.

Eric Hoffer
To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating.

Eric Hoffer
The capacity to resist coercion stems partly from the individual's identification with a group.

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

Eric Hoffer
If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.

Eric Hoffer
The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

Eric Hoffer
By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.

Eric Hoffer
That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.

Eric Hoffer
In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

Eric Hoffer
Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing.

Eric Hoffer
The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

Eric Hoffer
Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.

Eric Hoffer