Hoffer, Eric quotes
1902-1983 American Author PhilosopherThe world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
Hoffer, Eric
Depression
Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.
Hoffer, Eric
Death and Dying
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Hoffer, Eric
Happiness
How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
Hoffer, Eric
Death and Dying
There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
Hoffer, Eric
Chastity
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
Hoffer, Eric
Conformity
Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.
Hoffer, Eric
Compassion
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
Hoffer, Eric
Change
The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.
Hoffer, Eric
Dissatisfaction
Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy -- the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.
Hoffer, Eric
Disappointments
There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother s keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.
Hoffer, Eric
Brotherhood
What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?
Hoffer, Eric
Conventionality
When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.
Hoffer, Eric
Coward and Cowardice
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.
Hoffer, Eric
Credulity
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Ends and Means
It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.
Hoffer, Eric
Death and Dying
When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.
Hoffer, Eric
Bores and Boredom
We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.
Hoffer, Eric
Dreams
Friendship Never explain -- your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe it anyway. A real friend never gets in your way, unless you happen to be on the way down. A friend is someone you can do nothing with and enjoy it. However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. 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.
Hoffer, Eric
Friends and Friendship
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
Hoffer, Eric
Freedom
Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
Hoffer, Eric
Exaggeration
A great man s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.
Hoffer, Eric
Greatness
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
Hoffer, Eric
Faith
The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.
Hoffer, Eric
Evolution
Facts are counterrevolutionary.
Hoffer, Eric
Facts
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
Hoffer, Eric
Hatred
However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. 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.
Hoffer, Eric
Friends and Friendship
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Hoffer, Eric
Learning
We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.
Hoffer, Eric
Generalizations
Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
Hoffer, Eric
Habit
They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.
Hoffer, Eric
Failure
There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
Hoffer, Eric
Failure
Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.
Hoffer, Eric
Escapism
Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.
Hoffer, Eric
Fatigue
To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.
Hoffer, Eric
God
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
Hoffer, Eric
History and Historians
It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations --past and present --are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual s hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.
Hoffer, Eric
Individuality
Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.
Hoffer, Eric
Fatigue
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Example
A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
Hoffer, Eric
Heresy
There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
Hoffer, Eric
Generosity
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
Hoffer, Eric
Freedom
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.
Hoffer, Eric
Glory
Fear of becoming a has been keeps some people from becoming anything.
Hoffer, Eric
Fear
Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter unworthiness can be a source of courage.
Hoffer, Eric
Fear
The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man s first beginning.
Hoffer, Eric
Novelty
Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.
Hoffer, Eric
Manners
When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Hoffer, Eric
Modern and Modernism
To the old, the new is usually bad news.
Hoffer, Eric
Novelty
We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.
Hoffer, Eric
Judgment and Judges
There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.
Hoffer, Eric
Masses
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Hoffer, Eric
Lies and Lying
Man was nature s mistake --she neglected to finish him -- and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
Hoffer, Eric
Humankind
Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Hoffer, Eric
Ignorance
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
Hoffer, Eric
Self-sabotage
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
Hoffer, Eric
Living Together
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Malice
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Hoffer, Eric
Imitation
The real antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
Hoffer, Eric
Mediocrity
It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.
Hoffer, Eric
Influence
It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.
Hoffer, Eric
Music
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.
Hoffer, Eric
Literature
Intolerance is the Do Not Touch sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having our hair ruffled, but we will not tolerate any familiarity with the toupee which covers our baldness.
Hoffer, Eric
Intolerance
Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
Hoffer, Eric
Kindness
Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.
Hoffer, Eric
Nature
There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
Hoffer, Eric
Passion
It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.
Hoffer, Eric
Immigration
The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.
Hoffer, Eric
Persuasion
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story -- a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Hoffer, Eric
Story and Story-Telling
Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.
Hoffer, Eric
Nationalities and Nationalism
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
Hoffer, Eric
Power
A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.
Hoffer, Eric
Negotiation
A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
Hoffer, Eric
Socializing and Socialism
It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one s neighbor.
Hoffer, Eric
Neighbors
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Hoffer, Eric
Propaganda
That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.
Hoffer, Eric
Persecution
The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
Hoffer, Eric
Salvation
The necessary has never been man s top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man s greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.
Hoffer, Eric
Necessity
A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.
Hoffer, Eric
Misers and Misery
The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
Hoffer, Eric
Suspicion
To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.
Hoffer, Eric
Obvious
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Plays
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
Hoffer, Eric
Opportunity
Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.
Hoffer, Eric
Prejudice
More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.
Hoffer, Eric
Obscurity
Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.
Hoffer, Eric
Originality
It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
Hoffer, Eric
Opportunity
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy weakness wherever they see it.
Hoffer, Eric
Power
The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.
Hoffer, Eric
Prediction
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Minorities
Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
Hoffer, Eric
Sin
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.
Hoffer, Eric
Resentment
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
Hoffer, Eric
Science Fiction
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Space
To know a person s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Hoffer, Eric
Religion
There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
Hoffer, Eric
Totalitarianism
The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.
Hoffer, Eric
Revolutions and Revolutionaries
Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
Hoffer, Eric
Self-esteem
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
Hoffer, Eric
Technology
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
Hoffer, Eric
Self-esteem
Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
Hoffer, Eric
Society
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
Hoffer, Eric
Protest
We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
Hoffer, Eric
Revolutions and Revolutionaries
We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.
Hoffer, Eric
Talkativeness
Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.
Hoffer, Eric
Self-image
We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.
Hoffer, Eric
Purpose
The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
Hoffer, Eric
Sacrifice
No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.
Hoffer, Eric
Self-image
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Talent
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
Hoffer, Eric
Stupidity
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Solitude
A man by himself is in bad company.
Hoffer, Eric
Solitude
One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action --the ability to pass directly from thought to action.
Hoffer, Eric
Action
The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.
Hoffer, Eric
Autobiography
Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
Hoffer, Eric
Ambition
Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.
Hoffer, Eric
Age and Aging
The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.
Hoffer, Eric
Age and Aging
The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
Hoffer, Eric
America
The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
Hoffer, Eric
Discontent
It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.
Hoffer, Eric
Frustration
To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.
Hoffer, Eric
Age and Aging
The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
Hoffer, Eric
Existence
We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
Hoffer, Eric
Bigotry
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
Hoffer, Eric
Affectation
Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one s balance and keep afloat.
Hoffer, Eric
Action
Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.
Hoffer, Eric
Dissipation
Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.
Hoffer, Eric
Dissent
The beginning of thought is in disagreement -- not only with others but also with ourselves.
Hoffer, Eric
Dissent
Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of
Hoffer, Eric
Achievement
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
Hoffer, Eric
Adolescence
The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action the ability to pass directly from thought to action.
Hoffer, Eric
Action
When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.
Hoffer, Eric
Bigotry
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.
Hoffer, Eric
Favors
Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.
Hoffer, Eric
Capitalism
Animals often strike us as passionate machines.
Hoffer, Eric
Animals
It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
Hoffer, Eric
Evil
The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.
Hoffer, Eric
Wisdom
It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.
Hoffer, Eric
Weakness
Youth itself is a talent -- a perishable talent.
Hoffer, Eric
Youth