Eric Hoffer Quotes

The great Western disease is, ‘I'll be happy when... When I get the money. When I get a BMW. When I get this job. When I get the relationship,’ Well, the reality is, you never get to when. The only way to find happiness is to understand that happiness is not out there. It's in here. And happiness is not next week. It's now.

you already possess all you need to be genuinely happy.

When we focus mostly on our immediate needs, wants, and desires, we may achieve some of them but hardly feel satisfied. When we feel connected to ourselves on a deeper level, we get happy. We feel safe.

You can have everything in the world, but if you aren't happy within yourself, it's not worth it.

A lot of people say there is no happiness in this life and certainly there's no permanent happiness. But self-sufficiency creates happiness.

Wealth, taste and leisure can bring many things but they do not bring happiness.

Happiness is a state of inner fulfillment, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for outward things.

After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but is often true.

For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

There is no desire that anyone holds for any other reason than that they believe they will feel better in the achievement of it. Whether it is a material object, a physical state of being, a relationship, a condition, or a circumstance - at the heart of every desire is the desire to feel good. And so, the standard of success in life is not the things or the money - the standard of success is absolutely the amount of joy you feel.

Things and conditions can give you pleasure but they cannot give you joy- joy arises from within.

Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.

All that you need in order to have total happiness, fulfillment, and love in your life you already have right now, whoever you are, wherever you are.

Those who run after happiness will never be happy. Happiness is something that has to come to the fore from within.

If you're looking for happiness in things, you'll never find it.

You are without needs. There is nothing that you need in order to be perfectly happy. You only think that there is. Your deepest, most perfect happiness will be found within, and once you find it, nothing exterior to your Self can match it, nor can anything destroy it.

Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical 'experience machine' that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain and give you any positive feelings you desire. Most people to whom I offer this imaginary choice refuse the machine. It is not just positive feelings we want: we want to be entitled to our positive feelings.

From success you get a lot of things, but not that great inside thing that love brings you.

There are some things that you can fulfil with money, but at the end of the day these are not the things that make you happy. It is the small things that make life good.

What leads to unhappiness, is making pleasure the chief aim.

We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander.