Eric Hoffer Quotes

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

Many people love in themselves what they hate in others.

I am a deeply superficial person.

The sad truth is, there's more Walter White in me than I'd care to admit, because if I truly was as kind as people think I am, I wouldn't be able to write Walter White.

I've had to accept that - that everyone cannot love me. Because when there's love, there's hate. When there's light, there's dark. But it was really hard to accept as an artist that there's a lot of people that hate me, but on the other side, there are many more people who love me. I think everyone goes through that.

we all have too many wheels, screws and valves to judge each other on first impressions or one or two pointers. I don't understand you, you don't understand me and we don't understand ourselves.

If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

The same vices which are huge and insupportable in others we do not feel in ourselves.

Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined, and if you tried to separate them, you'd be missing something important and human.

If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.

Essentially, I'm a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I'm attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I'm the guy that would not turn the other cheek - but, when people see you're attracted to that, they think you are that.

We tend to see our character flaws as simple defects, and the simple defects of others as character flaws.

Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

Human nature seems to me like the Alps. The depths are profound, black as night, and terrifying, but the heights are equally real, uplifted in the sunshine.

The flame is not as bright to itself as it is to those it illuminates: so too the sage.

Everything I know, I know because of love.

The truth is, we never make for others the allowance we make for ourselves; and we should deny even our own words, could we hear them spoken by another.

There is a smile of love, And there is a smile of deceit, And there is a smile of smiles In which these two smiles meet.

Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.

Self-love increases or diminishes for us the good qualities of our friends, in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them; and we judge of their merit by the manner in which they act towards us.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.