Quote #218

We almost always have something to prove when we act heroically. We prove to ourselves and others that we are not what we and others thought we were. Our real self is petty, greedy, cowardly, dishonest and stewing in malice. And now in defying death and spitting in its eye we grasp at the chance of a grand refutation.

More from Eric Hoffer

  1. We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
  2. We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to attain excellence. To discover what a man truly craves but k…
  3. We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, b…
  4. We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often for…
  5. We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
  6. We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.
  7. To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps tr…
  8. We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

All Eric Hoffer quotes