You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
– Eric Hoffer
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
– Eric Hoffer
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.
– Eric Hoffer
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
– Eric Hoffer
We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
– Eric Hoffer
The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
– Eric Hoffer
A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
– Eric Hoffer
It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
– Eric Hoffer
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
– Eric Hoffer
We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
– Eric Hoffer
To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
– Eric Hoffer
The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
– Eric Hoffer
The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.
– Eric Hoffer
The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.
– Eric Hoffer
Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
– Eric Hoffer
Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
– Eric Hoffer
It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.
– Eric Hoffer
Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.