Reflections on the Human Condition
How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
Eric Hoffer • Reflections on the Human Condition
We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.
Eric Hoffer • Reflections on the Human Condition
The spectacular expansion of the adolescent group combined with a failure of nerve in the adult population has profoundly changed the nature of our society.
Eric Hoffer • Reflections on the Human Condition
in the long run social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
Eric Hoffer • Reflections on the Human Condition
How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!
Eric Hoffer • Reflections on the Human Condition
It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites—opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity—where energies flow smoothly in one direction—there will be much doing but no music.
Eric Hoffer • Reflections on the Human Condition
It has been said that all places are equidistant from heaven, and all eras equidistant from eternity.
Eric Hoffer • Reflections on the Human Condition
When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Eric Hoffer • Reflections on the Human Condition
There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.