Eric Hoffer Quotes

The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both these ends are reached by imitation.

I find it an effort to keep up appearances.

Everybody has many people inside of them; I think we tend to present the one we feel is most appropriate at first, in order to gain acceptance or achieve what we want. It gets really interesting when this technique fails, and other levels are revealed.

I'm a performer. I'm pretending to be someone else. I'm not putting my own self into the show every night.

I try to look cool. I strategize. Sometimes it's like - that's part of the strategizing, to make it seem like I don't think about it.

I'm not trying to be this cool girl. If you're trying to be something you're not, it's slowly going to bite you in the butt.

I do have friends, but they don't know me, only someone I've created to take my place. Someone sculpted from ice. I keep the melted me bottled up inside. Where no one can touch her, until, unbidden, she comes pouring out.

I'm the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world, so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.

She loved attention. It was like a glass of the best champagne—bubbly and intoxicating—and as with champagne, she always wanted more of it. Still, she didn’t want to seem like an easy mark. “If you must know, I’ve come to join a convent,” Evie said, testing him.

it is a curious fact, but one which all experience owns, that people do not desire so much to appear better, as to appear different from what they really are.

The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.

Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting?

I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.

The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities.

It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master

If a news camera shows up, people will line up, they want to be seen. But at the same time they want both to be chosen and not singled out. I think that is an endless struggle within most.

We're actors in our lives, pretendin' to be who we want people to think we are.

Just as bones, tissues, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes it possible to bear the sight of a human being, so the agitations and passions of the soul are wrapped up in vanity: it is the soul's skin.

I've grown to love L.A., but it's the most socially awkward place. All these people have come there not to be something but to pretend to be someone trying to be someone. Even in line for coffee, you're standing with someone who's trying to be so interesting.

Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

Trying to impress others does - usually in quite the opposite way.

I'm super-popular, so I had to pretend to be a loser, which was super-hard.