True Believer 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

Some people can't learn to play the guitar by reading a book. You have to actually try to manage a bit and you won't do well at first. — Keith Rabois

Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, 'Beware too much ecstasy,' whereas love says, 'Oh, never mind! Take the plunge!' Intellect does not easily break down, whereas love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble. But treasures are hidden among ruins. A broken heart hides treasures. — Elif Shafak

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

Beyond 60% utilization, the average response time doubles. By 80%, it has tripled. As disk I/O latency is often the bounding resource for an application, increasing the average latency by double or higher can have a significant negative effect on application performance. This is why disk utilization can become a problem well before it reaches 100%, as it is a queueing system where requests (typically) cannot be interrupted and must wait their turn. — Brendan Gregg

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

If I said any more it would just be a lie; you can't use words to corral something this wild. — Ben Weaver

It's such an honour being banned in Italy, the mother of sensuality. It's like being asked to straighten your tie in a bordello ... It's ironic that the pictures were removed on the complaint of a cardinal. I regard censorship as a cardinal sin. — Harold Town

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

A silent dark ... as black as a moonless lake, as a ravine's wings, darkness there and nothing more, merely this and nothing more ... — Dean Koontz

If a state political organization is founded in part upon a state religion with a dogma based on one or a few 'official' prophets, then shamanism, where every shaman is her or his own prophet, is dangerous to the state. [ ... ] Shamanism, as I said, is not a religion. The spiritual experience usually becomes a religion after politics has entered into it. — Michael Harner

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

They wanted to manipulate our songs - our fantastic, well-written songs with a soulful drive - beautiful English R&B - and turn them into pop rubbish. We might as well have been writing children's lullabies for all that did for me. We had to get away from that asshole. — Diane Rinella

If you know that something is true and just, and you give up, that's when you fail. — Andrew Forrest

But I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to find her that way. She was not a needle. This was not a haystack. We were people, and people had ways of finding each other. — David Levithan

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

Men died as she watched, and they didn't care about what they had fought for. — Tamora Pierce

Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart. Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy. — Nikos Kazantzakis

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

I think we need to draw a contextual distinction between what the neo-fascists of Europe would like to do and what the state of Israel has done. — Max Blumenthal

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

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