Eric Hoffer Quotes

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

~ Eric Hoffer

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

~ Eric Hoffer

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

~ Eric Hoffer

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.

~ Eric Hoffer

It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.

~ Eric Hoffer

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

~ Eric Hoffer

If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.

~ Eric Hoffer

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.

~ Eric Hoffer

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven and who believed that nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

~ Eric Hoffer

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.

~ Eric Hoffer

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

~ Eric Hoffer

No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.

~ Eric Hoffer

Anger is the prelude to courage.

~ Eric Hoffer

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

~ 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

Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.

~ Eric Hoffer

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

~ 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

Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.

~ Eric Hoffer

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

~ Eric Hoffer

In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.Nature has no compassion. It is, in the words of William Blake, a creation that groans, living on the death; where fish and bird and beast and tree and metal and stone live by devouring. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

~ 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

If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self-evident.

~ Eric Hoffer

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 millenia.

~ Eric Hoffer

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

~ Eric Hoffer

They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor. (Eric Hoffer 1902-1983)

~ Eric Hoffer

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.

~ Eric Hoffer

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

~ Eric Hoffer

If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.

~ 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. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.

~ Eric Hoffer

There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive.

~ Eric Hoffer

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

~ Eric Hoffer

When people are bored it is primarily with their own selves.

~ Eric Hoffer

When people are bored it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.

~ Eric Hoffer

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

~ Eric Hoffer

It is thus with most of us we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

~ Eric Hoffer

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have 'something worth fighting for' they do not feel like fighting.

~ Eric Hoffer

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

~ Eric Hoffer

Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.

~ Eric Hoffer

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

~ Eric Hoffer