747 Quotes by Eric Hoffer

You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone.

To learn you need a certain degree of confidence, not too much and not too little. If you have too little confidence, you will think you can’t learn. If you have too much, you will think you don’t have to learn.

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

An easygoing person is probably more accessible to the realization of eternity – the endless flow of life and death – than one who takes his prospects and duties overseriously. It is the overserious who are truly frivolous.

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor.

A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”

Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin. We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation.

The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.