Eric Hoffer Quotes About Life
-
Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
→ -
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
→ -
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
→ -
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
→ -
We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.
→ -
It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.
→ -
Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
→ -
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.
→ -
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.
→ -
However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.
→ -
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
→ -
The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft.
→
Related Authors
-
Karen Horney Psychoanalyst -
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Professor -
Edmund Burke Statesman -
Eric Sevareid Journalist -
Anna Freud Psychologist -
Immanuel Kant Philosopher -
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Author -
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Author -
Michel de Montaigne Writer -
Eric Berne Author -
-
Erich Fromm Psychologist -
Sidney Poitier Actor -
David D. Burns Author -
Thomas Sowell Economist -
Matt Labash Journalist -
William James Philosopher -
Stanislav Grof Psychiatrist -
John Derbyshire Writer -
M. Stanton Evans Journalist