Eric Hoffer

There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self read more

There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They asked to be deceived.

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own read more

It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own image. Rather does he create Him in the image of his cravings and dreams- in the image of what man wants to be. God making could be part of the process by which a society realizes its aspirations: it first embodies them in the conception of a particular God, and then proceeds to imitate that God. The confidence requisite for attempting the unprecedented is most effectively generated by the fiction that in realizing the new we are imitating rather than originating. Our preoccupation with heaven can be part of an effort to find precedents for the unprecedented.

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We read more

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.

...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.

...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.