Eric Hoffer
- Old age equalizes--we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.
(topic: age)
- Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
(topic: ambition)
- We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.
(topic: body)
- Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.
(topic: failure)
- There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
(topic: gifts and giving)
- It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites--opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity--where energies flow smoothly in one direction--there will be much doing but no music.
(topic: music)
- Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.
(topic: power)
- Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
(topic: power)
- 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.
(topic: solitude-loneliness)
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