Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.”

— Eric Hoffer

252. “We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.”

— Eric Hoffer

253. “Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.”

— Eric Hoffer

254. “The intellectual cannot operate at room temperature.”

— Eric Hoffer

255. “To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.”

— Eric Hoffer

256. “The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.”

— Eric Hoffer

257. “How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!”

— Eric Hoffer

258. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

259. “It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.”

— Eric Hoffer

260. “It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.”

— Eric Hoffer

261. “It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our worthlessness we do not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. We hate then the whole world, and we would pour our wrath upon the whole of creation.”

— Eric Hoffer

262. “Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.”

— Eric Hoffer

263. “Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.”

— Eric Hoffer

264. “The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.”

— Eric Hoffer

265. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

266. “The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.”

— Eric Hoffer

267. “There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.”

— Eric Hoffer

268. “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 millenia.”

— Eric Hoffer

269. “The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.”

— Eric Hoffer

270. “In a trader-dominated society, the scribe is usually kept out of the management of affairs, but it given a more or less free hand in the cultural field. By frustrating the scribe’s craving for commanding action, the trader draws upon himself the scribe’s wrath and scorn.”

— Eric Hoffer

271. “The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.”

— Eric Hoffer

272. “The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause. God wishes, said Calvin, that one should put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory...”

— Eric Hoffer

273. “The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.”

— Eric Hoffer

274. “The liberal sees the present as the legitimate offspring of the past and as constantly growing and developing toward an improved future: to damage the present is to maim the future. All three then cherish the present, and, as one would expect, they do not take willingly to the idea of self-sacrifice.”

— Eric Hoffer

275. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

276. “It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.”

— Eric Hoffer

277. “There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.”

— Eric Hoffer

278. “You cannot gauge the intelligence of an American by talking with him; you must work with him. The American polishes and refines his way of doing things-even the most commonplace-the way the French of the 17th century polished their maxims.”

— Eric Hoffer

279. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

280. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

281. “Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.”

— Eric Hoffer

282. “The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.”

— Eric Hoffer

283. “When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom – freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.”

— Eric Hoffer

284. “It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.”

— Eric Hoffer

285. “Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.”

— Eric Hoffer

286. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

287. “There is in even the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that what we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind the selfless in the exercise of self-sacrifice.”

— Eric Hoffer

288. “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 the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment.”

— Eric Hoffer

289. “Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.”

— Eric Hoffer

290. “Those who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. It is a device to camouflage their shortcomings. For when we fail in attempting the possible, the blame is solely ours; but when we fail in attempting the impossible, we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task. There is less risk in being discredited when trying the impossible than when trying the possible. It is thus that failure in everyday affairs often breeds an extravagant audacity. One.”

— Eric Hoffer

291. “Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.”

— Eric Hoffer

292. “The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.”

— Eric Hoffer

293. “All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.”

— Eric Hoffer

294. “There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind.”

— Eric Hoffer

295. “There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for.”

— Eric Hoffer

296. “Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world.”

— Eric Hoffer

297. “Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.”

— Eric Hoffer

298. “Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.”

— Eric Hoffer

299. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

300. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer