Eric Hoffer

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

Know people for who they are rather than for what they are.

You are the fever that never broke, the name stuck in my throat. You are every letter of every word in every poem I ever wrote.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Wide awake and so confused.

I’ve put up with more humiliation than I care to remember.

When I was a little girl, I so wanted to be sociable, but I was scared that I wasn’t going to be able to speak a sentence because I had such a bad stammer.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find how far one can go.

Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

I only ask to be free, the butterflies are free.

All begins with you surrounding yourself with the right people—the good and authentic people—and “unsurrounding” yourself with the wrong people. And we both know there are plenty of wrong people in this world.

At the end of the day, whether or not those people are comfortable with how you’re living your life doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you’re comfortable with it.

We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.

Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.