Eric Hoffer Quotes

I don't go out and play football and stuff - that's not me. I want to think, I want to build, I want to talk, I want to create.

Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn't mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It's about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

The specious figments of genius, and the erratic flights of philosophy, may excite our wonder, but they cannot stand the ordeal of scrutiny, or the Lydian touch of experiment.

The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

I don't need to move my body. I need to move my ideas.

I know how to think outside of the box and be creative.

The idea is to be unrestrained by categories.

You're always moving and thinking about a whole bunch of things. But those traits work well for me in studios and in meetings about creative ideas. If you listen to the songs I write, they are the most ADHD songs ever. They have five hooks in one and it all happens in three minutes. I figured out a way of working with it.

I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to followany idea, wise or mad that may present itself. My ideas are my harlots.

I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

Imagination is a powerful force underlying all knowing

Knowing a lot...is a springboard to creativity.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

If you really want you people to innovate, buy a science fiction book, tear off the covers, and tell them it's history.

The critical mind is the creative mind.

Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.

Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

I can imagine anything except having no imagination.

The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.

Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.

Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.

The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity.

A lot of philosophy is bull***t, but a lot of it is what we write songs about too. And it's organizing your thoughts, organizing your intellect.