Eric Hoffer Soul Quotations

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy -- the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul, is somehow the offspring of resistance of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom.

A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.

Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life.

There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.

To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.

Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance - a flailing of the arms to to regain one's balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.

Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.