Eric Hoffer
Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.Collection: Nature
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.Collection: Happiness
It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.Collection: Love
It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.Collection: Failure
Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.Collection: Alone
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.Collection: Thankful
We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.Collection: Dreams
The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.Collection: Future
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.Collection: Power
There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.Collection: Failure
Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.Collection: Power
Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.Collection: Space
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.Collection: History
Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.Collection: Faith
Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.Collection: Leadership
It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.Collection: Age
In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.Collection: Change
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.Collection: Faith
Children are the keys of paradise.Collection: Family
Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.Collection: Hope
The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.Collection: Fear
We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.Collection: Fear
To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.Collection: Faith
Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.Collection: Strength
Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.Collection: Trust
We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.
The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.
The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.
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.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.
A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.
Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.