747 Quotes by Eric Hoffer

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.

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

Anger is a prelude to courage.

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.

The untalented are more at ease in a society that gives them valid alibis for not achieving than in one where opportunities are abundant. In an affluent society, the alienated who clamor for power are largely untalented people who cannot make use of the unprecedented opportunities for self-realization, and cannot escape the confrontation with an ineffectual self.

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

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.

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.