Quote

To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.

Eric Hoffer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Eric Hoffer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 25
Died: 1983
Died: May 21
Philosopher
Psychologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Treat
Treats
Hatred
Conversely
Enemy
Magnanimity
Wrong
Blunt
Hate
Despise
Fuel
Add

More quotes by Eric Hoffer

Image
The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Help your sister's boat across the water, and yours too will reach the other side. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
Eric Hoffer
Image
What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.
Eric Hoffer
Image
We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
Eric Hoffer
Image
It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.
Eric Hoffer
Image
One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
Eric Hoffer
Image
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.
Eric Hoffer
Image
It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.
Eric Hoffer
Image
A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.
Eric Hoffer
Image
It is not at all simple to understand the simple.
Eric Hoffer
Image
However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance - a flailing of the arms to to regain one's balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
Eric Hoffer