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"America meant freedom and what is
freedom? To Hoffer it is the capacity to feel like oneself. He felt like Eric
Hoffer; sometimes like Eric Hoffer, working man. It could be said, I believe,
that he is the first important American writer, working class born, who
remained working class-in his habits, associations, environment. I cannot
think of another. Therefore, he was a national resource. The only one of its
kind in the nation's possession." - Eric
Sevareid, from his dedication speech to Eric Hoffer |
Books
by Eric Hoffer:
by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 1933435100, 136 pgs)
It is my impression that no one really likes the new. We are afraid of it. It is not only as Dostoyevsky put it that “taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.” Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.
In the case of drastic change the
uneasiness is of course deeper and more lasting. We can never be really
prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every
radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: We undergo a test; we have to
prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change
without inner trembling.
–from The Ordeal of Change
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And Other Aphorisms
by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 1933435097, 120 pgs)
There is in most passions a
shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a
fugitive.
Passions usually have their roots
in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us. The
passionate attitude is less a response to stimuli from without than an
emanation of an inner dissatisfaction.
A poignant dissatisfaction, whatever be its cause, is at bottom a dissatisfaction with ourselves. It is surprising how much hardship and humiliation a man will endure without bitterness when he has not the least doubt about his worth or when he is so integrated with others that he is not aware of a separate self.
–from The Passionate State of
Mind
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by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 1933435011, 120 pgs)
It
is curious how blurred my childhood memories are. I lost my sight at the age of
seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did
not recover and died in that second year after the fall. I lost my sight and
for a time my memory. I heard, my father speak of me as an “idiot child.”
I regained my sight at the age of fifteen. I never took the trouble to learn the causes of the sudden loss and return of sight. Martha said jokingly that it was a miracle the Hoffers managed to stay alive. None of them lived past fifty. “Never worry about the future, Eric—you’ll be dead by the time you are forty.” Her words sank into my mind and became a source of lightheartedness during my years as a migratory worker. I went through life like a tourist.
–from Truth Imagined
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Reflections on the Human Condition
by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 1933435143, 88 pgs)
Nature attains perfection, but man
never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually
unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this
incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in
the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable
unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning
and growing. …
Everywhere we look at present we
see something new trying to be born. A pregnant, swollen world is writhing in
labor, and everywhere untrained quacks are officiating as obstetricians. These
quacks say that the only way the new can be born is by a Caesarean operation.
They lust to rip the belly of the world open.
–from Reflections on the Human Condition
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by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 1933435224, 106 pgs)
Our age is not the age of the masses but the age of
the intellectuals. Everywhere you look you can see
intellectuals easing the traditional men of action out
of their seats of power. In many parts of the world
there are now intellectuals acting as large-scale
industrialists, as military leaders, as statesmen
and empire builders. By intellectual I mean a
literate person who feels himself a member of
the educated minority. It is not actual intellectual
superiority which makes the intellectual but the
feeling of belonging to an intellectual elite.
–from The Temper of Our Time
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by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 9781933435282, 96 pgs)
In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes—courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty—can be trans-muted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: Where there is com-passion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. Thus the survival of the species may well depend on the ability to foster a boundless capacity for compassion.
–from In Our Time
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by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 9781933435275, 92 pgs)
Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America. An excellent historian thinks Americans are “the most frightening people in the world,” and a foremost philologist sees America as “the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace and to international cooperation.” Others call America a “pig heaven,” “a monster with 200 million heads,” “a cancer on the body of mankind.”
–from First Things, Last Things
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on the Waterfront
by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 9781933435299, 136 pgs)
They have been predicting the dire things that would happen to art, literature, and culture in general if the lowbrow masses asserted themselves and imposed their tastes on a society. But could anything equal the inanity and imposture spewed by avant-garde cliques and accepted by self-appointed guardians of our culture? ... Eventually the inanities will be swept away by people of talent who will build the new with a sure hand. My feeling is that when talented people who have something to say use the new techniques their work will be accessible even to the uninitiated. ... How easy it is to forget a mood or perhaps feelings in general. We can remember an act or something we saw, heard, or smelled, but we cannot remember the feelings of happiness, despair, elation, dejection, etc., unless we have encased them in words. ...
–from Working and Thinking on the Waterfront
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by
Eric Hoffer
(ISBN 9781933435305, 140 pgs)
The other day I finished the first draft of a slim collection of short essays. I suddenly had the feeling that I had been scraping the bottom of the barrel, and that the slim volume might mark my end as a thinker. I doubted whether I would ever get involved in a new, seminal train of thought. It was legitimate to assume that at the age of seventy-two my mind was played out. I did not panic. ... I remembered something I wrote in Reflections on the Human Condition: “That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and exhilaration.” Would it be possible to reanimate and cultivate the alertness to the first, faint stirrings of thought? What would happen if I forced myself over a period of several months to sluice my mind the way I sluiced dirt in my gold-hunting days, using a diary as a sluicebox to trap whatever flakes of insight might turn up?
–from Before the Sabbath
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Hoffer’s books have been
painstakingly edited and restored by award-winning author Christopher Klim and Hopewell Publications.