Eric Hoffer Quotes
Eric Hoffer Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Eric Hoffer quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Eric Hoffer. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.
By Eric Hoffer
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.
By Eric Hoffer
Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.
By 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.
By Eric Hoffer
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 a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.
By Eric Hoffer
One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
By Eric Hoffer
One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.
By Eric Hoffer
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity
By Eric Hoffer
Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.
By Eric Hoffer
Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
By Eric Hoffer
It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.
By Eric Hoffer
It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.
By Eric Hoffer
It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.
By Eric Hoffer
It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.
By Eric Hoffer
It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.
By Eric Hoffer
It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.
By Eric Hoffer
It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.
By Eric Hoffer
It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.
By Eric Hoffer
It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
By 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.
By Eric Hoffer
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world which no longer exists.
By 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.
By Eric Hoffer
However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.
By Eric Hoffer
He who has nothing and wants something is less frustrated than he who has something and wants more.
By Eric Hoffer