Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and exhilaration.”

— Eric Hoffer

102. “Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.”

— Eric Hoffer

103. “Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts.”

— Eric Hoffer

104. “Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.”

— Eric Hoffer

105. “Lack of self-awareness renders us transparent. A soul that knows itself is opaque; like Adam after he ate from the tree of knowledge it uses words as fig leaves to cover its nakedness and shame.”

— Eric Hoffer

106. “A good sentence is a key. It unlocks the mind of the reader.”

— Eric Hoffer

107. “Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.”

— Eric Hoffer

108. “We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate.”

— Eric Hoffer

109. “Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.”

— Eric Hoffer

110. “When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else – we are the busiest people in the world.”

— Eric Hoffer

111. “Children are the keys of paradise.”

— Eric Hoffer

112. “We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.”

— Eric Hoffer

113. “If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.”

— Eric Hoffer

114. “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. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

116. “The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.”

— Eric Hoffer

117. “Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.”

— Eric Hoffer

118. “It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.”

— Eric Hoffer

119. “Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.”

— Eric Hoffer

120. “Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.”

— Eric Hoffer

121. “The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth.”

— Eric Hoffer

122. “There is a time when the word “eventually” has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.”

— Eric Hoffer

123. “When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.”

— Eric Hoffer

124. “We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.”

— Eric Hoffer

125. “The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.”

— Eric Hoffer

126. “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

— Eric Hoffer

127. “The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome.”

— Eric Hoffer

128. “Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.”

— Eric Hoffer

129. “Nature attains perfection, but man never does.”

— Eric Hoffer

130. “Some people are born to spend their lives catching up; and they are as a rule the passionate ones.”

— Eric Hoffer

131. “If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.”

— Eric Hoffer

132. “The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.”

— Eric Hoffer

133. “There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.”

— Eric Hoffer

134. “To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.”

— Eric Hoffer

135. “Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.”

— Eric Hoffer

136. “Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one’s religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?”

— Eric Hoffer

137. “Language was invented to ask questions.”

— Eric Hoffer

138. “Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.”

— Eric Hoffer

139. “We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.”

— Eric Hoffer

140. “The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.”

— Eric Hoffer

141. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

142. “Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a nation, a race, a part or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.”

— Eric Hoffer

143. “The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.”

— Eric Hoffer

144. “Communists are frustrated capitalists.”

— Eric Hoffer

145. “Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.”

— Eric Hoffer

146. “The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.”

— Eric Hoffer

147. “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

148. “A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

150. “There is no alienation that a little power will not cure.”

— Eric Hoffer