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Eric Hoffer Quotes - Page 21

All Quotes Acceptance Achievement Age Ambition Anxiety Art Atheism Atheist Attitude Awareness Balance Belief Business Change Character Children Communism Compassion Conformity Conservatism Country Creativity Death Deception Dedication Desire Destiny Devil Diversity Doubt Dying Education Effort Energy Environment Envy Equality Evil Excellence Experience Failure Faith Fashion Fate Fear Feelings Fighting Freedom Frustration Future Generosity Giving Glory Growing Up Growth Happiness Hate Hatred Heart History Home Hope Humanity Humility Hunger Ignorance Impulse Independence Individuality Inspirational Integrity Judging Justice Kindness Knowledge Language Laughter Leadership Learning Liberty Life Literature Loneliness Love Loyalty Lying Manifestation Motivational Nature Opportunity Originality Overcoming Passion Past Philosophy Power Prejudice Pride Propaganda Prophet Protest Purpose Quality Reality Reflection Rejection Religion Resentment Respect Responsibility Righteousness Running Sacrifice Sadness Self Confidence Self Esteem Self Respect Sin Society Soul Spring Success Suffering Talent Teaching Technology Time Tolerance Truth Unity Vision Water Weakness Winning Wisdom Work Writing Youth

Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy

Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning.

Marriage, Names, Boredom

Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.

Happiness, Believe, Mean

Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.

Past, Men, Giving

Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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

Nature, Mistake, Men

Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.

Attitude, Fighting, Self

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

Work, Obvious, Spells

Eric Hoffer (1955). “The passionate state of mind, and other aphorisms”

In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

Loyalty, Ignorance, Men

Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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

Giving, Sublime, Literature

Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.

Children, Lying, Integrity

Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

Change, Confidence, Self Esteem

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

Frustration, Frustrated, Mind

Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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

Failure, Expression, Land

Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.

Mean, Done, Vengeance

"Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely'" by Eric Hoffer, The New York Times Magazine (p. 57), April 25, 1971.

We probably have a greater love for those we support than for those who support us. Our vanity carries more weight than our self-interest.

Vanity, Self, Support

A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.

Order, Intellectual, Economy

Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

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.

Fear, Men, Self

Eric Hoffer (1955). “The passionate state of mind, and other aphorisms”

No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments.

Thinking, Achievement, Might

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.

Passion, Action, Mark

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.

Fear, Mean, Way

This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter

Men, Effort, Desire

The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.

Engineering, Important, Problem

Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them

Order, Growth, Development

Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.

Opposites, Soul, Tension

Eric Hoffer (1969). “Working and Thinking on the Waterfront: A Journal, June 1958-May 1959”

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

Mother, Giving, Literature

Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction and between profession and practice - that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt - are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.

Strong, Practice, Feelings

Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

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