 |
Protest
|
|
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, Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
|
|
|
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Purpose
|
|
|
We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Questions
|
|
|
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Religion
|
|
|
To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Revolution
|
|
|
The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
|
We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Risk
|
|
|
Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They become responsive to grandiose schemes, and will display unequaled steadfastness, formidable energies and a special fitness in the performance of tasks which would stump superior people. It seems paradoxical that defeat in dealing with the possible should embolden people to attempt the impossible, but a familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals that what seems a path of daring is actually an easy way out: It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. For when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Sacrifice
|
|
|
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.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Satisfaction
|
|
|
The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Science Fiction
|
|
|
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Self Respect
|
|
|
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Self-love
|
|
|
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.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Sin
|
|
|
Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Society
|
|
|
Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Solitude
|
|
|
With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
|
A man by himself is in bad company.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
|
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.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Space
|
|
|
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.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Storytelling
|
|
|
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story -- a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Strength
|
|
|
Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Success & Failure
|
|
|
Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Talent
|
|
|
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Technology
|
|
|
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
-Eric Hoffer
|
|
Tolerance
|
|
|
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.
-Eric Hoffer
|
Books by and about Eric Hoffer