Eric Hoffer – Quotes Crazy

It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned. – Eric Hoffer

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle. – Eric Hoffer

When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it. – Eric Hoffer

The necessary has never been mans top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, mans greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities. – Eric Hoffer

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented. – Eric Hoffer

We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious. – Eric Hoffer

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise. – Eric Hoffer

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. – Eric Hoffer

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny. – Eric Hoffer

The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches. – Eric Hoffer

There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brothers keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper. – Eric Hoffer

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor. – Eric Hoffer

The beginning of thought is in disagreement — not only with others but also with ourselves. – Eric Hoffer

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet. – Eric Hoffer

What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else? – Eric Hoffer

The real antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity. – Eric Hoffer

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern. – Eric Hoffer

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival. – Eric Hoffer

The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop. – Eric Hoffer

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it. – Eric Hoffer