Eric Hoffer Quotes

We are men without ambition, and all we want is to be left alone, in peace so that we can try and be happy. So few people will understand this simplicity.

Life is all about having a good time.

My philosophy is to take one day at a time. I don't worry about the future. Tomorrow is even out of sight for me.

Your heart will be shattered by sorrow if you force it to live in tomorrow's ephemeral imagination - world instead of in today's eternal reality - now.

There are necessary evils. Money is an important thing in terms of representing freedom in our world. And now I have a daughter to think about. It's really the first time I've thought about the future and what it could be.

People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.

I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.

When you relinquish the desire to control your future, you can have more happiness.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

To be at ease is better than to be at business. Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

If I never competed again, it wouldn't bother me. I don't care.

Big Idea - Your days are your life in miniature. As you live your hours, so you create your years. As you live your days, so you craft your life. What you do today is actually creating your future. The words you speak, the thoughts you think, the food you eat and the actions you take are defining your destiny - shaping who you are becoming and what your life will stand for. Small choices lead to giant consequences over time. There's no such thing as an unimportant day.

What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.

But I have no desire for fame and power anymore. I crawled out of the swamp and I'm not crawling back in.

Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.

Happiness has not to all the same name: to Youth she is known as the Future; Age knows her as the Dream.

Happiness is a tiger in your tank and a pussycat in your back seat.

Enjoy the present hour, Be thankful for the past, And neither fear nor wish Th' approaches of the last.

I think that's all I want in life, just like peace and be able to make music and like have happiness when it's time off. Spend time with people and family, whatever.

Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.

The past is gone, the future is not here, now I am free of both. Right now, I choose joy.

My hat goes off to anybody who can sit down and put their heads together. I am ready for something like that because I am free and I am happy and I have time. There were a lot of things in the way before. I have nothing but time, and I love getting older.

This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.

When you forgive somebody else you accept the responsibility for your own future.