Eric Hoffer Quotes

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them.

Prejudices are not easily got rid of as an old coat which is no longer thought of.

It's hard for the majority of people to accept what they don't understand.

It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.

The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way.

The greatest enemy of progress is the illusion of knowledge.

Pride... limits or stops progression. The proud are not easily taught. They won't change their minds to accept truths, because to do so implies they have been wrong.

Unteachable from infancy to tomb — There is the first & main characteristic of mankind.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

She live in a mindset that I could never move to

You're just like crosstown traffic, so hard to get through to you.

There is no man so blind as one who has made up his mind.

Stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

Like this gas tank, you are overflowing with preconceptions, full of useless knowledge. You hold many facts and opinions, yet know little of yourself. Before you can learn, you'll have to first empty your tank.

My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.

There's none so blind as those who will not listen.

False taste is always busy to mislead those that are entering upon the regions of learning; and the traveller, uncertain of his way, and forsaken by the sun, will be pleased to see a fainter orb arise on the horizon, that may rescue him from total darkness, though with weak and borrowed lustre.

Intellectually, most people never wash. They never free their minds of the accumulated rubbish of centuries.

Much that we hug today as knowledge is ignorance pure and simple. It makes the mind wander and even reduces it to a vacuity.

Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.

The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.

The combination of fear and ignorance (two sides of the same coin) can be paralyzing.

Stupidity is not another form of knowledge.

I'm a big thinker, and sometimes I think too much, and my brain can get in the way of myself.