Eric Hoffer - The Passionate State of Mind (1955)

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

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

Eric Hoffer
Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.

Eric Hoffer
A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.

Eric Hoffer
Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.

Eric Hoffer
The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.

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
The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.

Eric Hoffer
It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

Eric Hoffer
Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.

Eric Hoffer
Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.

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
You cannot gauge the intelligence of an American by talking with him; you must work with him. The American polishes and refines his way of doing things-even the most commonplace-the way the French of the 17th century polished their maxims.

Eric Hoffer
In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.

Eric Hoffer
Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.

Eric Hoffer
Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.

Eric Hoffer
A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.

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
When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.

Eric Hoffer
Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.

Eric Hoffer