Quote

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

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
Food
Futility
Poor
Starvation
Free
Wholly
Lives
Shelter
Sense
Desperate
Live
Engaged
Poverty
Borderline
Struggle
Purposeful

More quotes by Eric Hoffer

Image
How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
Eric Hoffer
Image
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Children are the keys of paradise.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience... The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending -- for making a show -- and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.
Eric Hoffer
Image
For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.
Eric Hoffer
Image
It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.
Eric Hoffer
Image
When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.
Eric Hoffer
Image
We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true they ruin our dreams.
Eric Hoffer
Image
People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.
Eric Hoffer
Image
In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Sensuality reconciles us with the human race. The misanthropy of the old is due in large part to the fading of the magic glow of desire.
Eric Hoffer
Image
To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Eric Hoffer
Image
...the majority of people cannot endure the bareness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.
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