Eric Hoffer Quotes

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

We feel free when we escape, even if it be from the frying pan into the fire.

Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.

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.

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.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

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

Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day; we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.

The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.