Eric Hoffer Quotes

As we had no part of our will on our entrance into this life, we should not presume to any on our leaving it, but soberly learn to will which He wills.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

The way I want to be remembered is not the way I will be, and I'm cool with that.

I used to worry a lot and regret a lot before I took on this whole concept of karma. But now I understand that destiny is what it's all about. I still push ahead and look forward to achieving certain goals but I try not to lay up expectations that they have to happen.

If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?

That is our ‘pointed task. Love & die.

I have to not take myself too seriously and I have to realise that if it is meant to be, it will be.

Everything is meant to be lost, that the soul may stand in unhampered nothingness

Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous inscription: KNOW THYSELF! It reminded visitors that man must never believe himself to be more than mortal - and that no man can escape his destiny.

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

There is no tragedy, only the unavoidable. Everything has its reason for being: you only need to distinguish what is temporary from what is lasting.

It is in the middle that human choices are made; the beginning and the end remain with God. The decrees of God are birth and death, and in between those limits man makes his own distress or joy.

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived - and dying I will tend to later.

Life is made of our attitudes. And there are certain things that the gods oblige us to live through. Their reason for this does not matter, and there is no action we can take to make them pass us by.

The end of a man's life is often compared to the winding up of a well written play, where the principal persons still act in character, whatever the fate in which they undergo.

Do you ever wonder why things have to turn out the way they do?

When I pass, speak freely of my shortcomings and my flaws. Learn from them, for I'll have no ego to injure.

If there is no destiny, there is no design. There's only life and death. My goal is to learn about life by living it, not by trying to figure out a cryptic plan that the Creator had in store for me.

Our fate is something which exists outside ourselves, and which once revealed expresses the meaning of our lives. Apart, however, from soothsayers who claim to have a means of foretelling exactly what will befall us, this kind of fate is only normally revealed after a life has ended. Only then can the meaning of that life be understood.

I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.

From here on out, there's just reality. I think that's what maturity is: a stoic response to endless reality. But then, what do I know?

... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.

Here halt, I pray you, make a little stay. O wayfarer, to read what I have writ, And know by my fate what thy fate shall be. What thou art now, so shall thou be. The world's delight I followed with a heart Unsatisfied: ashes am I, and dust.