Quotes By Eric Hoffer

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

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

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.

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.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

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

Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.

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

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

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

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

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

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

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

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

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

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

Children are the keys of paradise.

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.