Quotes from Eric Hoffer

Misery does not automatically generate discontent, nor is the intensity of discontent directly proportionate to the degree of misery. [...] A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed. […] Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.

Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.     104

Our preoccupation with other people - whether we aid or hinder them, love or hate them - is at bottom a means of getting away from ourselves. It is strange to contemplate that competition with others - the breathless race to get ahead of others - is basically a running away from ourselves

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.     142

though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.

There is even in the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind in the exercise of self-sacrifice. Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization?

It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one which comes with the most perfected collective framework wins.

A man is likely to mind his own business, when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his ownmeaningless affairs and by minding other people's business.

Some people are born to spend their lives catching up; and they are as a rule the passionate ones.

I can do no better than quote 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.

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him. 71

You can't do it right too often:author bob wyrick. A fanatic is a person who redoubles his effort after he's lost sight of his aim.

in modern times nationalism is the most copious and durable source of mass enthusiasm

To the child, the savage, and the Wall Street operator everything seems possible, hence their credulity.

It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.     41

You can never have enough of that which you don't need.

When hopes are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which hollows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us