Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

— Eric Hoffer

Featured in: Learning Quotes, Changing the World Quotes, Lifelong Learning Quotes, Adaptability Quotes, Clever Quotes

2. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

— Eric Hoffer

3. “To change everything, simply change your attitude.”

— Eric Hoffer

4. “The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.”

— Eric Hoffer

5. “Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.”

— Eric Hoffer

6. “To learn you need a certain degree of confidence, not too much and not too little. If you have too little confidence, you will think you can’t learn. If you have too much, you will think you don’t have to learn.”

— Eric Hoffer

7. “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

9. “For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future; but an excuse can last for life.”

— Eric Hoffer

10. “You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.”

— Eric Hoffer

11. “The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.”

— Eric Hoffer

12. “In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

14. “We feel free when we escape – even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.”

— Eric Hoffer

Featured in: Quotes About Fire

15. “The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.”

— Eric Hoffer

16. “We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

18. “There can be no freedom without freedom to fail.”

— Eric Hoffer

19. “It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.”

— Eric Hoffer

20. “The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.”

— Eric Hoffer

Featured in: Leadership Quotes

21. “What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.”

— Eric Hoffer

22. “Fair play is primarily not blaming others for anything that is wrong with us.”

— Eric Hoffer

23. “Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.”

— Eric Hoffer

24. “A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

27. “Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”

— Eric Hoffer

28. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

29. “We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.”

— Eric Hoffer

30. “Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.”

— Eric Hoffer

31. “The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.”

— Eric Hoffer

32. “Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.”

— Eric Hoffer

33. “Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”

— Eric Hoffer

34. “It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.”

— Eric Hoffer

35. “A great man’s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.”

— Eric Hoffer

36. “Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy – the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.”

— Eric Hoffer

37. “A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.”

— Eric Hoffer

38. “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.”

— Eric Hoffer

39. “Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.”

— Eric Hoffer

40. “The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.”

— Eric Hoffer

41. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

42. “Anger is a prelude to courage.”

— Eric Hoffer

43. “Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.”

— Eric Hoffer

44. “To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.”

— Eric Hoffer

45. “Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.”

— Eric Hoffer

46. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

47. “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

49. “It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence.”

— Eric Hoffer

50. “It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.”

— Eric Hoffer