Eric Hoffer Quotes

I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I think, and out of all that I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can.

Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

WHAT a person thinks is determined by HOW a person thinks.

Fuzzy thinking is, after all, just one step above not thinking at all. But to take the ideas of serious transformational thinkers and philosophers and throw the "new age" label at them is also abhorrent.

I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.

The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity.

Think. That's what we need you to do. Think.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

The old metaphysical prejudice that man 'always thinks' has not yet entirely disappeared. I am myself inclined to hold that man really thinks very little and very seldom.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

I think the greatest tragedy of mankind is that people have ideas and opinions in their heads but don't have a process for properly examining these ideas to find out what's true. That creates a world of distortions.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.

Extreme skepticism and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don't think I'm the first to say that.

The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff.

Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

Communists must always go into the why's and wherefore's of anything, use their own heads and carefully think over whether or not it corresponds to reality and is really well founded; on no account should they follow blindly and encourage slavishness.

I never thought of that before! It's my opinion that you never think at all.

I do not call reason that brutal reason which crushes with its weight what is holy and sacred, that malignant reason which delights in the errors it succeeds in discovering, that unfeeling and scornful reason which insults credulity.

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.