Quotes from Eric Hoffer

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.

Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.

People in a hurry cannot think cannot grow nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.

Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.

Anger is a prelude to courage.

However much we guard against it we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.

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.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.

Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.

First something is a great idea, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business and finally it becomes a racket.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.

No one has a right to happiness.

By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.