Eric Hoffer quote: "Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning."

Children are the keys of paradise.
ERIC HOFFER

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
ERIC HOFFER

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

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and ...
ERIC HOFFER

The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.
ERIC HOFFER

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to le...
ERIC HOFFER

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us...
ERIC HOFFER

Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.
ERIC HOFFER

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

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

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
ERIC HOFFER

The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flowby t...
ERIC HOFFER

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When t...
ERIC HOFFER

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!
ERIC HOFFER

There is probably an element of malice in the readiness to overestimate people; we are laying up for...
ERIC HOFFER

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is as true of men as of dogs.
ERIC HOFFER

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a sym...
ERIC HOFFER

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

The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger ...
ERIC HOFFER

It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer f...
ERIC HOFFER

The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
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...
ERIC HOFFER

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

ERIC HOFFER

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind. -Eric Hoffer.
ERIC HOFFER

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of...
ERIC HOFFER

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in w...
ERIC HOFFER

Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.
ERIC HOFFER

The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their ...
ERIC HOFFER

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as ...
ERIC HOFFER

Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in l...
ERIC HOFFER

Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for se...
ERIC HOFFER

Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.
ERIC HOFFER

Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions ...
ERIC HOFFER

The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither ac...
ERIC HOFFER

When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common...
ERIC HOFFER

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. The resentment of the weak does not spring...
ERIC HOFFER

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. For we can...
ERIC HOFFER

Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would i...
ERIC HOFFER

To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain e...
ERIC HOFFER

Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.
ERIC HOFFER

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposi...
ERIC HOFFER

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmar...
ERIC HOFFER

The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind.
ERIC HOFFER

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

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
ERIC HOFFER

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create someth...
ERIC HOFFER

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist...
ERIC HOFFER

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and presen...
ERIC HOFFER

Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stu...
ERIC HOFFER

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anyth...
ERIC HOFFER

Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.
ERIC HOFFER

No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need p...
ERIC HOFFER

The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of t...
ERIC HOFFER

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find them...
ERIC HOFFER

It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.
ERIC HOFFER

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.
ERIC HOFFER

The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things o...
ERIC HOFFER

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim a...
ERIC HOFFER

We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.
ERIC HOFFER

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy -- the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and...
ERIC HOFFER

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about o...
ERIC HOFFER

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine h...
ERIC HOFFER

A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.
ERIC HOFFER

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the pre...
ERIC HOFFER

The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword an...
ERIC HOFFER

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every...
ERIC HOFFER

A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-...
ERIC HOFFER

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.
ERIC HOFFER

We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we hav...
ERIC HOFFER

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

The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic...
ERIC HOFFER

Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
ERIC HOFFER

The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil ...
ERIC HOFFER

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.
ERIC HOFFER

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but...
ERIC HOFFER

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
ERIC HOFFER

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
ERIC HOFFER

They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspi...
ERIC HOFFER

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his ow...
ERIC HOFFER

Facts are counterrevolutionary.
ERIC HOFFER

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opini...
ERIC HOFFER

A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.
ERIC HOFFER

Man was nature's mistake --she neglected to finish him -- and she has never ceased paying for her mi...
ERIC HOFFER

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in th...
ERIC HOFFER

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
ERIC HOFFER

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
ERIC HOFFER

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, ...
ERIC HOFFER

The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind...
ERIC HOFFER

To the old, the new is usually bad news.
ERIC HOFFER

The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.
ERIC HOFFER

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
ERIC HOFFER

Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the...
ERIC HOFFER

To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as h...
ERIC HOFFER

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to ...
ERIC HOFFER

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
ERIC HOFFER

The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altoge...
ERIC HOFFER

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
ERIC HOFFER

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses ...
ERIC HOFFER

We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are ...
ERIC HOFFER

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-eviden...
ERIC HOFFER

The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the b...
ERIC HOFFER

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do un...
ERIC HOFFER

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
ERIC HOFFER

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like ...
ERIC HOFFER

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing...
ERIC HOFFER

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
ERIC HOFFER

What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?
ERIC HOFFER

Intolerance is the Do Not Touch sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having o...
ERIC HOFFER

It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is ...
ERIC HOFFER

It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer fr...
ERIC HOFFER

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominate...
ERIC HOFFER

There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a jo...
ERIC HOFFER

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and ...
ERIC HOFFER

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the...
ERIC HOFFER

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious vic...
ERIC HOFFER

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not or...
ERIC HOFFER

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigran...
ERIC HOFFER

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
ERIC HOFFER

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers...
ERIC HOFFER

The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the ...
ERIC HOFFER

When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
ERIC HOFFER

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

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
ERIC HOFFER

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission an...
ERIC HOFFER

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

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of a...
ERIC HOFFER

We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and con...
ERIC HOFFER

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
ERIC HOFFER

There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being hi...
ERIC HOFFER

All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action...
ERIC HOFFER

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
ERIC HOFFER

Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers a...
ERIC HOFFER

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
ERIC HOFFER

Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the t...
ERIC HOFFER

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The ...
ERIC HOFFER

Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossibl...
ERIC HOFFER

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wis...
ERIC HOFFER

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: chan...
ERIC HOFFER

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and th...
ERIC HOFFER

We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the ...
ERIC HOFFER

Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions m...
ERIC HOFFER

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meani...
ERIC HOFFER

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a ...
ERIC HOFFER

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And w...
ERIC HOFFER

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of...
ERIC HOFFER

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
ERIC HOFFER

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
ERIC HOFFER

It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor.
ERIC HOFFER

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem e...
ERIC HOFFER

Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.
ERIC HOFFER

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that ...
ERIC HOFFER

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire cr...
ERIC HOFFER

Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want ...
ERIC HOFFER

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to ...
ERIC HOFFER

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the ...
ERIC HOFFER

A man by himself is in bad company.
ERIC HOFFER

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the p...
ERIC HOFFER

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
ERIC HOFFER

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
ERIC HOFFER

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
ERIC HOFFER

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many i...
ERIC HOFFER

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prom...
ERIC HOFFER

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares no...
ERIC HOFFER

The nature of society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow-by th...
ERIC HOFFER

It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.
ERIC HOFFER

There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a...
ERIC HOFFER

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
ERIC HOFFER

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possib...
ERIC HOFFER

Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling o...
ERIC HOFFER

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.
ERIC HOFFER

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
ERIC HOFFER

Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of m...
ERIC HOFFER

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.
ERIC HOFFER

In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equippe...
ERIC HOFFER

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitaria...
ERIC HOFFER

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength
ERIC HOFFER

The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by d...
ERIC HOFFER

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
ERIC HOFFER

It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.
ERIC HOFFER

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of...
ERIC HOFFER

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were,...
ERIC HOFFER

Our great weariness comes from work not done.
ERIC HOFFER

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opi...
ERIC HOFFER

There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it
ERIC HOFFER

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.
ERIC HOFFER

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.
ERIC HOFFER

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the ...
ERIC HOFFER

The game of History is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of thr majority in th...
ERIC HOFFER

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that ...
ERIC HOFFER

You dehumanize a man as much by returning him to nature - by making him one with rocks, vegetation, ...
ERIC HOFFER

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And w...
ERIC HOFFER

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragemen...
ERIC HOFFER

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in w...
ERIC HOFFER

To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes - we are aware that what is happening to us has hap...
ERIC HOFFER

It is easier to love humanity as a whole that to love one's neighbor.
ERIC HOFFER

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we r...
ERIC HOFFER

One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ...
ERIC HOFFER

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
ERIC HOFFER

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

Eric Hoffer

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