Eric Hoffer
A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.Collection: Society
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.Collection: Responsibility
Faith is primarily a process of identification; the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal.Collection: Individual
The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.Collection: Ambition
Intolerance is the ''Do Not Touch'' sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having our hair ruffled, but we will not tolerate any familiarity with the toupee which covers our baldness.Collection: Funny
There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind.Collection: Mind
That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and exhilaration.Collection: Unique
One is not quite certain that creativeness in the arts, literature, and science functions best in an environment of absolute freedom. Chances are that a relatively mild tyranny stimulates creativeness.Collection: Art
People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.Collection: Responsibility
Rudeness luxuriates in the absence of self-respect.Collection: Self
The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.Collection: Students
Rudeness is the weak man's limitation of strength.Collection: Men
We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The "men-of-words"- priests, prophets, intellectuals- have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.Collection: Military
Language was invented to ask questions.Collection: Humanness Is
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.Collection: Life
The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.Collection: Communism
The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.Collection: Respect
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.Collection: Religious
How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.Collection: Death
It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music.Collection: Music
No totalitarian censor can approach the implacability of the censor who controls the line of communication between the outer world and our consciousness. Nothing is allowed to reach us which might weaken our confidence and lower our morale. To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth.Collection: Communication
By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.Collection: Animal
The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.Collection: Philosophy
Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.Collection: Death
We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.Collection: Strong
No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.Collection: Motivational
Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence.Collection: Strong
Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance.Collection: Humble
In man's life, the absence of an essential component usually leads to the adoption of a substitute. The substitute is usually embraced with vehemence and extremism, for we have to convince ourselves that what we took as second choice is the best there ever was. Thus blind faith is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action; and pride a substitute for an unattainable self-respect.Collection: Pride
A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.Collection: Running
The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others. The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven, too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish.Collection: Religious
Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.Collection: Letting Go
A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.Collection: Mean
The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.Collection: Self
Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.Collection: Frustration
It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.Collection: Dream
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.Collection: Freedom
The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind.Collection: Passion
The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breeds pride and arrogance.Collection: Religious
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement.Collection: Achievement
We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.Collection: Remember
The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.Collection: Power
Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.Collection: Men
A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.Collection: War
It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.Collection: Opposites
In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.Collection: Faith
Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.Collection: Dirty
Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom."Collection: Responsibility
There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.Collection: Creative