Eric Hoffer Way Quotations

The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and function without him. This is true not only of the writer, artist and scientist, but of creators in other fields.With the noncreative it is the other way around: in whatever they do, they arrange things so that they themselves become indispensable.

There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.

There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it

Resistance, whether to one's appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character.

Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.

We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.

The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft.

Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future... We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken.