Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The education explosion is producing a vast number of people who want to live significant, important lives but lack the ability to satisfy this craving for importance by individual achievement. The country is being swamped with nobodies who want to be somebodies.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

253. “We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.”

— Eric Hoffer

254. “No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

256. “It is perhaps true that the criminal who embraces a holy cause is more ready to risk his life and go to extremes in its defense than people who are awed by the sanctity of life and property.”

— Eric Hoffer

257. “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

258. “The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

261. “How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.”

— Eric Hoffer

262. “Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.”

— Eric Hoffer

263. “People unfit for freedom – who cannot do much with it – are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a “have” type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a “have not” type of self.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

266. “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

267. “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

268. “To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes – we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.”

— Eric Hoffer

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

273. “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

274. “In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.”

— Eric Hoffer

275. “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.”

— Eric Hoffer

276. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

278. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

280. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

286. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.”

— Eric Hoffer

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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. This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat. 11.”

— Eric Hoffer

299. “There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.”

— Eric Hoffer

300. “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