Top 593 Quotes & Sayings by Eric Hoffer - Page 2

A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.

When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

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

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

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

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

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

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

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

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

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

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

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

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

Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.

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.

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.

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

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.

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

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

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

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

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

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.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

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

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

To the old, the new is usually bad news.

A man by himself is in bad company.

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.

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

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

Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

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

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

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

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

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

Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.

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

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.

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

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

Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.

A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.

The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.

I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.

The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.

All mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ.

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

Far more critical than what we know or what we don't know is what we don't want to know.