Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Discontent, Work
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
Topics: Autobiography, Crises, Legacy
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Imitation, Being True to Yourself, Role models
It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.
—Eric Hoffer
The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Wisdom
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Science Fiction
Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Balance
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
Topics: Belief, Self-Discovery
Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Space
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Motivation
There is radicalism in all getting and conservatism in all keeping. Lovemaking is radical, while marriage is conservative.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Marriage
We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
—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
Topics: Art, Music
We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Purpose
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
Topics: Affectation
It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.
—Eric Hoffer
Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Sin
Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Wisdom, Habit, Habits
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
Topics: Coward, Cowardice
We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Conversation
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
Topics: Kindness
There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
—Eric Hoffer
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: Knowledge, Rightness, Future, Inheritance, Right, Learn, Change, Learning
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
Topics: Youth, Thrift
Nothing comes easily. My work smells of sweat.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Writing
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
Topics: Fashion
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
Topics: Work
Animals often strike us as passionate machines.
—Eric Hoffer
Topics: Animals
The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.
—Eric Hoffer
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
—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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