Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble.”

— Eric Hoffer

402. “A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.”

— Eric Hoffer

403. “Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.”

— Eric Hoffer

404. “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

405. “The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.”

— Eric Hoffer

406. “To believe that if only we had this or that we would be happy, or to pursue any excessive desire, diverts us from seeing that happiness depends on an adequate self.”

— Eric Hoffer

407. “They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society. 29.”

— Eric Hoffer

408. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

412. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.”

— Eric Hoffer

421. “Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.”

— Eric Hoffer

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

427. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

429. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

431. “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

432. “A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.”

— Eric Hoffer

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

436. “It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.”

— Eric Hoffer

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer