It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.
—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
Topics: Necessity
Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Wisdom, Habits, Habit
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
Topics: Money, Misery
A great man’s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things
There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Loneliness, Failure
It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Influence, Leadership
We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Confidence
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Propaganda
We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.
—Eric Hoffer
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying, Lying
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Motivation
It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Weakness, Defects
We feel free when we escape – even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Freedom
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
Topics: Corruption
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
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
Topics: Solitude
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
Topics: Difficulty, Achievement, Success & Failure
The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are…. Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware…still clinging to things that no longer exist.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Change
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Hate, Hatred
In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Right, Learning, Knowledge, Change, Learn, Rightness, Future, Inheritance
The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
—Eric Hoffer
The fear of becoming a ‘has-been’ keeps some people from becoming anything.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Fashion
We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Prejudice
Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Opportunity
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
Topics: Action
The beginning of thought is in disagreement—not only with others but also with ourselves.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Dissent
Anger is a prelude to courage.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Anger, Courage
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 from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: The Future
One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world’s problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive – it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.
—Eric Hoffer
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William James American Philosopher
- John Dewey American Philosopher
- Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Will Durant American Historian, Philosopher
- Henry David Thoreau American Philosopher
- George Santayana Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
- Rollo May American Philosopher
- Ralph Waldo Emerson American Philosopher
- Jiddu Krishnamurti Indian Philosopher
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