Eric Hoffer

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.

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

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

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

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream… I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people’s tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

Don’t wait until you’re in a crisis to come up with a crisis plan.

If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a chance of being a prophet.

We are entering an era when we shall create resources which shall be so constantly renewed that the only loss will be not to use them. There will be such a plenteous supply of heat, light and power, that it will be a sin not to use all we want. This era is coming now. And it is coming by way of Water.

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before–more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.

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.

She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.

It is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else’s.

You are mine, and that means I am on your side even when no one else is.

Time wounds all heels.

I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential high-mindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.