747 Quotes by Eric Hoffer

Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a G-d, but never without belief in a devil. Usually, the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.

A good sentence is a key. It unlocks the mind of the reader.

The necessary has never been man’s 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, man’s greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.

We feel free when we escape – even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

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. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

Far more critical than what we know or what we don’t know is what we don’t want to know.

A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one’s own life.