A Quote by Eric Hoffer

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.

Eric Hoffer

Quote Topics

Cutting Down Element Later Laying Malice Our Ourselves Overestimate People Pleasure Readiness Size Them Up Were

Quote Author

Eric Hoffer
American - Writer
July 25, 1898 - May 21, 1983

We grew to our present size almost against ourselves. It was not a deliberately planned commercial venture in the sense that I sat down and said that we were going to make ourselves into a huge financial octopus. We evolved by necessity. We did not sit down and say to ourselves, 'How can we make a big pile of dough?' It just happened.

Walt Disney

Because we make ourselves deaf to feedback, because we overestimate our abilities, because we become consumed with ourselves, we end up subjecting ourselves not just to the inevitable stumbles or difficulties of life but catastrophic, painful failures.

Ryan Holiday

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

Doris Lessing

We now have a lack of readiness that is quite scary. We have planes that were - that Harry Truman inaugurated, the B-52. We have - the Navy has been gutted and decimated. The readiness of the Marines is way down.

Jeb Bush

That is not to say that we can relax our readiness to defend ourselves. Our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves.

Chester W. Nimitz

Our problem in the 2015 general election was that for all the good stuff that was in the Labour manifesto, we were still going to be freezing public sector wages, cutting council expenditure, laying off civil servants. We were offering 'austerity light' instead of a real alternative.

Jeremy Corbyn

At the umbilical region we actually network with people. Picture that you are cutting those cords to everyone you know. It doesn't mean you don't love them; you are just cutting down on the negative energy pickup from people.

Frederick Lenz

There is one way whereby we may secure our riches, and make sure friends to ourselves of them,--by laying them out in charity.

John Tillotson

Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths.

Patricia Churchland

If something produces an undue amount of pleasure or undue amount of displeasure, it's going to be judged differently and it's going to be introduced in your narrative with a different size, with a different development. So that is the next element to superimpose on the sequencing element. And in fact, that element is so powerful that very often it can trump the sequencing event, that the sequencing aspect.

Antonio Damasio

We compliment weight loss, monitor our appetites, and shrink ourselves to fit some kind of standard. I wish we could all be the size we actually are. One size doesn't fit all because there are as many sizes as there are women. Let's look closer at the size of our hearts, the width of our souls, and the length of our spirits.

Sark

Over time, as the thinking mind begins to settle [through the practice of meditation], we’ll start to see our patterns and habits far more clearly. Sometimes this can be a painful experience. I can’t overestimate the importance of accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, not as we wish we were or think we ought to be. By cultivating nonjudgmental openness to ourselves and to whatever arises, to our surprise and delight we will find ourselves genuinely welcoming the never-pin-downable quality of life, experiencing it as a friend, a teacher, and a support, and no longer as an enemy.

Pema Chodron

We wear a lot of labels in our lives, and it's so very easy to be defined by them. We have grown somehow accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a size eight or a size fourteen, as a capricorn or a taurus, as single or in love.

Ally Carter

People went to bed when the sun went down and they woke up when the sun came up. That's what our bodies are naturally programmed to do. However, with all the new stresses in life with electricity, with technology, we tend to override that system and we'll stay up later and we'll get up earlier or later, and we use alarm clocks, we use the light.

Shelby Harris

I think words speak to us even though they may be written on a wall. So we hear them in our mind. We say it to ourselves. But they are also visual things. You draw them. They are designed. They are colored. They have a certain size. I put them in a certain place. So they are objects that have to be - artistic decisions have to be made in terms of the color and the size and the line and whatever.