Quotes from Eric Hoffer

Belief passes, but to have believed never passes.     18

To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats — we know it not.

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

a) the poor, (b) misfits, (c) outcasts, (d) minorities, (e) adolescent youth, (f) the ambitious (whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities), (g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession, (h) the impotent (in body or mind), (i) the inordinately selfish, (j) the bored, (k) the sinners.

One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual's most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses. He has managed to thrive in social orders dominated by kings, nobles, priests, and merchants, but not in societies suffused with the tastes and values of the masses.

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. People

The conservatism of a religion—its orthodoxy—is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. A rising religious movement is all change and experiment—open to new views and techniques from all quarters.

Montaigne: "All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed." PART 1

No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.

To the Jews the age of 13 (the Sumerian unit of 12 plus 1) marks the threshold of adulthood. It is curious how significant multiples of 13 are in the individual's life. At 2 x 13 the mind catches up with the body. 3 x 13 marks the beginning of a change of life. At 4 x 13 creative people catch their second breath. 5 x 13 is the age of retirement, and 6 x 13 most often marks the end of life.

The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves.

I have a tremendously high opinion of the age of five, by the way. I actually think that to become really mature is to return to the age of five, to become able to recapture the capacity for absorption, for learning, the tremendous hunger to master skills that you have at five years...I always feel that I was a brilliant child at the age of five, and that I've been declining ever since.

they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world.

Pascal was of the opinion that "one was well-minded to understand holy writ when one hated oneself."20 There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity

Hitler, who had a clear vision of the whole course of a movement even while he was nursing his infant National Socialism, warned that a movement retains its vigor only so long as it can offer nothing in the present—only "honor and fame in the eyes of posterity

It is well for those who hug the present and want to preserve it as it is not to play with mass movements. For it always fares ill with the present when a genuine mass movement is on the march.

A movement's call for action evokes an eager response in the frustrated, for they see in action a cure for all that ails them. It brings self-forgetting and gives them a sense of purpose and worth. Indeed it seems that frustration stems chiefly from an inability to act, and that the most poignantly frustrated are those whose talents and temperament equip them ideally for a life of action but are condemned by circumstances to rust away in idleness.

The spokesmen of democracy offer no holy cause to cling to and no corporate whole to lose oneself in.

The man just out of the army is an ideal potential convert, and we find him among the early adherents of all contemporary mass movements. He feels alone and lost in the free-for-all of civilian life. The

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.

This is undoubtedly a primitive state of being, and its most perfect examples are found among primitive tribes. Mass movements strive to approximate this primitive perfection, and we are not imagining things when the anti-individualist bias of contemporary mass movements strikes us as a throwback to the primitive.

To a religious movement the present is a place of exile, a vale of tears leading to the heavenly kingdom; to a social revolution it is a mean way station on the road to Utopia; to a nationalist movement it is an ignoble episode preceding the final triumph.