Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Faith is primarily a process of identification; the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal.”

— Eric Hoffer

402. “It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause.9 Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.”

— Eric Hoffer

403. “Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people’s assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.”

— Eric Hoffer

404. “The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.”

— Eric Hoffer

405. “Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.”

— Eric Hoffer

406. “There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it.”

— Eric Hoffer

407. “Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.”

— Eric Hoffer

408. “They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society.”

— Eric Hoffer

409. “The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.”

— Eric Hoffer

410. “The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.”

— Eric Hoffer

411. “To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.”

— Eric Hoffer

412. “Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.”

— Eric Hoffer

413. “A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.”

— Eric Hoffer

414. “The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.”

— Eric Hoffer

415. “To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.”

— Eric Hoffer

416. “Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.”

— Eric Hoffer

417. “Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.”

— Eric Hoffer

418. “Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.”

— Eric Hoffer

419. “By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.”

— Eric Hoffer

420. “Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.”

— Eric Hoffer

421. “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

422. “This food-and-shelter theory concerning man’s efforts is without insight. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter.”

— Eric Hoffer

423. “That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.”

— Eric Hoffer

424. “You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone.”

— Eric Hoffer

425. “It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.”

— Eric Hoffer

426. “The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.”

— Eric Hoffer

427. “We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone; we are not alone when we imitate.”

— Eric Hoffer

428. “Resistance, whether to one’s appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character.”

— Eric Hoffer

429. “Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience – the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or “of those who are to be.” We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.”

— Eric Hoffer

430. “We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising.”

— Eric Hoffer

431. “One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses. He has managed to thrive in social orders dominated by kings, nobles, priests, and merchants, but not in societies suffused with the tastes and values of the masses.”

— Eric Hoffer

432. “People haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”

— Eric Hoffer

433. “One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause.”

— Eric Hoffer

434. “It is apparently vital that we should be in the dark about ourselves not to be clear about our intentions, fears, and hopes. There is a stubborn effort in us to set up a compact screen between consciousness and the self.”

— Eric Hoffer

435. “My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.”

— Eric Hoffer

436. “Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.”

— Eric Hoffer

437. “We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.”

— Eric Hoffer

438. “To the old, the new is usually bad news.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

441. “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.”

— Eric Hoffer

442. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

444. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

446. “An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin. It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless but also as vile. To confess and repent is to slough off one’s individual distinctness and separateness, and salvation is found by losing oneself in the holy oneness of the congregation.”

— Eric Hoffer

447. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

450. “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