Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.”

— Eric Hoffer

452. “A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.”

— Eric Hoffer

453. “It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.”

— Eric Hoffer

454. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

455. “Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.”

— Eric Hoffer

456. “To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.”

— Eric Hoffer

457. “We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.”

— Eric Hoffer

458. “The original insight is most likely to come when elements stored in different compartments of the mind drift into the open, jostle one another, and now and then form new combinations.”

— Eric Hoffer

459. “The individual’s most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.”

— Eric Hoffer

460. “What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

462. “However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.”

— Eric Hoffer

463. “The contribution of the Western democracies to the awakening of the East has been indirect and certainly unintended. They have kindled an enthusiasm of resentment against the West; and it is this anti-Western fervor which is at present rousing the Orient from its stagnation of centuries.2.”

— Eric Hoffer

464. “It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.”

— Eric Hoffer

465. “The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.”

— Eric Hoffer

466. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

467. “The indispensability of play-acting in the grim business of dying and killing is particularly evident in the case of armies. Their uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music, and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the soldier from his flesh-and-blood self and mask the overwhelming reality of life and death.”

— Eric Hoffer

468. “It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.”

— Eric Hoffer

469. “It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one which comes with the most perfected collective framework wins.”

— Eric Hoffer

470. “Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.”

— Eric Hoffer

471. “Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others.”

— Eric Hoffer

472. “Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others.12 No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. They.”

— Eric Hoffer

473. “Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.”

— Eric Hoffer

474. “All prayers and hopes are a reaching-out for coincidences.”

— Eric Hoffer

475. “Animals often strike us as passionate machines.”

— Eric Hoffer

476. “On the other hand, those who reject the present and fix their eyes and hearts on things to come have a faculty for detecting the embryo of future danger or advantage in the ripeness of their times.”

— Eric Hoffer

477. “To lose one’s life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.”

— Eric Hoffer

478. “Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.”

— Eric Hoffer

479. “It is startling to see how the oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.”

— Eric Hoffer

480. “A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.”

— Eric Hoffer

481. “The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.”

— Eric Hoffer

482. “How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.”

— Eric Hoffer

483. “All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium.”

— Eric Hoffer

484. “The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.”

— Eric Hoffer

485. “An active mass movement rejects the present and centers its interest on the future. It is from this attitude that it derives its strength, for it can proceed recklessly with the present – with the health, wealth and lives of its followers.”

— Eric Hoffer

486. “The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.”

— Eric Hoffer

487. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

488. “There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing as exciting as a detective’s deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect.”

— Eric Hoffer

489. “If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.”

— Eric Hoffer

490. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

491. “Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

493. “The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.”

— Eric Hoffer

494. “There is also this: when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment.”

— Eric Hoffer

495. “Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.”

— Eric Hoffer

496. “One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure.”

— Eric Hoffer

497. “It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.”

— Eric Hoffer

498. “There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives.”

— Eric Hoffer

499. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

500. “Sensuality reconciles us with the human race. The misanthropy of the old is due in large part to the fading of the magic glow of desire.”

— Eric Hoffer