Eric Hoffer Quotes

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

Judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to bring it down one day.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.

It's funny how dogs and cats know the inside of folks better than other folks do, isn't it?

How Instinct varies in the grov'ling swine.

Dogs act exactly the way we would act if we had no shame.

Zoologists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50 -- but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers.

I’m adding ‘canine’ to my searches,” I said. “And ‘instinct.’” “Whatever. I’m adding ‘lunatic.

Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

My cat brought me a toy. I thanked her and threw it. She sat there gave me a look that made me realize people and dogs are the crazy ones.

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.

In the distance, the gestures of animals look human, the gestures of human beings bestial.

A dog can't think that much about what he's doing, he just does what feels right.

Farm animals are just as interesting and intelligent as the dogs and cats who we know a bit betterYet they are treated by the meat industry as though they are inanimate objects with no feelings or personalities.

I know a lot of animal communicators and I think a lot of them are just good behaviorists because they pick up on a lot little posture things like how the eyes look, the posture of the cat ears, is it tense? They're picking up just a lot of their body cues from the dog, the cat or the horse.

[Footnote:] To give the Beaver his due, he does things because he has to do them, not because he believes that hard work per se will somehow make him a better Beaver -- the Beaver may be dumb, but he is not that dumb! The Beaver was made to gnaw, and gnaw he does. There you have him in a nutshell.

Almost everybody can be imagined as either a cat or a dog.

Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy.