True Believer By Eric Hoffer Quotes & Sayings

To lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much. — Eric Hoffer

For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities. — Eric Hoffer

The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ. — Eric Hoffer

Here's how to turn the world upside down: take what is, and turn it upside down. Or take what is and make it was isn't. Or take what isn't and make it what is. Or take what is and shake it till change falls out of its pockets. Or take any hierarchy and plug the constituents of its bottom into the categories of its top. Or take any number of hierarchies and mix up their parts. — Anonymous

The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish. — Eric Hoffer

To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair. — Eric Hoffer

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. — Eric Hoffer

The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole
the church, party, nation
and not to his fellow true believer. — Eric Hoffer

Sometimes love tries to do too much. — Charles Todd

There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive. — Eric Hoffer

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. — Eric Hoffer

Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B. — Dorothy Parker

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed:
1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer;
2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind. — Eric Hoffer

She especially liked my bedside lamp, which had a five-sided porcelain shade. Unlit, the shade seemed like bumpy ivory. Lit, each panel came to life with the image of a bird: a blue jay, a cardinal, wrens, an oriole, and a dove. Kathleen turned it off and on again, several times. "How does it do that?"
"The panels are called lithophanes." I knew because I'd asked my father about the lamp, years ago. "The porcelain is carved and painted. You can see it if you look inside the shade."
"No," she said. "It's magic. I don't want to know how it's done. — Susan Hubbard

I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life. — Sara Sheridan

The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing. — Eduard Bernstein

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith - faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. — Eric Hoffer

Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole the church, party, nation and not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society . — Eric Hoffer

The enemy - the indispensible devil of every mass movement - is omnipresent. He plots both outside and inside the ranks of the faithful. It is his voice that speaks through the mouth of the dissenter, and the deviationists are his stooges. If anything goes wrong within the movement, it is his doing. It is the sacred duty of the true believer to be suspicious. He must be constantly on the lookout for saboteurs, spies and traitors. — Eric Hoffer

The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person. — Eric Hoffer

If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope. — Eric Hoffer

Sites of battle held on to a madness, as if the blood that had soaked into the soil remembered pain and terror and held locked within it the echoes of screams and death cries. — Steven Erikson