Eric Hoffer

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.

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

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

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

Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

To the old, the new is usually bad news.

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.

The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.

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.

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

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.

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.

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.

We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.

The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

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

The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

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.

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.

The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.

Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are.