Quotes By Eric Hoffer

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.

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

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

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

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

When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.

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 man by himself is in bad company.

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

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

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

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.

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

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

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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