Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Self-esteem]

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Self-esteem]

No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Self-image]

Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Self-image]

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Self-sabotage]

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Sin]

A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Socializing and Socialism]

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Society]

A man by himself is in bad company.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Solitude]

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Solitude]

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Space]

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 - [Story and Story-Telling]

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Stupidity]

The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Suspicion]

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Talent]

We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Talkativeness]

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Technology]

There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Totalitarianism]

It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Weakness]

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
~ Eric Hoffer - [Passion]