Eric Hoffer Quotes

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. 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.

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.

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

إن إحباطنا عندما نملك الكثير, ونريد المزيد يفوق إحباطنا عندما لا نملك شيئًا ونريد القليل. ونحن أقل تذمرًا حين نفقد أشياء كثيرة منا, حين لا نفقد إلا شيئًا واحدًا.

Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.

All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium.

Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.

The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice.

The men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in possession of some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of man’s reason and the boundless range of his intelligence.

J. B. S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C and 1400 A.D. It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.