Quotes from Eric Hoffer

Help your sister's boat across the water, and yours too will reach the other side. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.

It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

What Pascal said of an effective religion is true of any effective doctrine: it must be "contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.

Those of little faith are of little hatred.

Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

Rudeness luxuriates in the absence of self-respect.

We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves.

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.

Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.

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.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

We feel free when we escape, even if it be from the frying pan into the fire.

Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.

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.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else--we are the busiest people in the world.