Hoffer's papers, including 131 of the notebooks he carried in his pockets, were acquired in 2000 by the Hoover Institution Archives. The papers fill 75 feet (23 m) of shelf space. Because Hoffer cultivated an aphoristic style, the unpublished notebooks (dated from 1949 to 1977) contain very significant work. Available for scholarly study since at least 2003, little of their contents has yet been published. A selection of fifty aphorisms, focusing on the development of unrealized human talents through the creative process, appeared in the July 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine.[19]Chasing down the links, I arrived at Sparks: Eric Hoffer and the art of the notebook by Tom Bethell from July 1, 2005.
Here are the Hoffer aphorisms or observations from that article. Just about all of them call for some meditation or exposition but better that I simply record them here. Left to be meditated on later, they will disappear to the back of the mental cupboard of things to be gotten to.
THINKING AS CARICATURE
To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. "To illustrate a principle," says Bagehot, "you must exaggerate much and you must omit much." As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought: it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind--they are interesting and they stimulate. 1950
EXCITING THOUGHTS
There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing--as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect. 1950
HANGING IN THERE
What merit there is in my thinking is derived from two peculiarities: (1) My inability to be familiar with anything. I simply can't take things for granted. (2) My endless patience. I assume that the only way to find an answer is to hang on long enough and keep groping.1951
POLEMICS GIVE WARMTH
Perhaps people throw themselves into heated polemics to give content to their lives, to warm their hearts. What Luther said of hatred is true of all quarreling. There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting. 1950
WHAT OTHERS THINK
It is not good for our efforts at self-realization to know the opinions other people have of us. It is difficult or perhaps impossible to be ourselves if we are known. 1951
THE INCOMPLETE INDIVIDUAL
It is fearfully simple: The incomplete individual cannot stand on his own, cannot make sense by himself. He is a part and not a self-sufficient whole. He can make sense, have a purpose, and seem useful when he becomes a part of a functioning whole. 1951
BROODING
I am more and more convinced that taking life over seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of an Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights. 1952
THE DESIRE FOR PRAISE
This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservation of what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinion of others.The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter. 1952
LITTLE TO SAY
If writing gives us satisfaction, we are likely to end up writing for definite periods each day even when we have little to say. The hanging on to an empty form is almost natural since it is the form only that we can control and stage. There is, of course, also the unconscious assumption that once you stage the form, the content will come to nest in it of itself. All ritual is perhaps based on this assumption: you stage the gesture and words that go with fervor and faith and you assume that the latter will somehow materialize.1952
PLENTY OF TIME
The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time--not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me. 1952
GROANS OF CREATION
The sense of worth derived from creative work depends upon "recognition" by others,which is never automatic. As a result, the path of self-realization, even when it is the only open one, is taken with reluctance. Men of talent have to be goaded to engage in creative work. The groans and laments of even the most gifted and prolific echo through the ages. 1953
THOUGHT AS TREASON
To think for oneself is not only, as Gide said, counterrevolutionary but also apostasy and,at certain times, treason. 1953
UPHILL THINKING
To think of one's self the first thing in the morning and last thing before falling asleep constitutes a most dejecting routine. There is a feeling of lowness about it all. Our preoccupation with thought and with problems, of whatever nature, is a climb up a steep incline. When we slip and hit bottom we are left with the sole preoccupation with the self.1953
THINKING AND WAITING
Thinking with me is like looking for a person whose address I don't know. I stand on a street corner all day long waiting for him to pass by. Certainly there are more efficient ways of locating a person whose address you don't know. But if you have a whole lifetime to wait and enjoy watching things go by, then waiting on street corners is as good a method as any. If you don't find the person you are looking for, you might meet someone else. 1953
A YEAR'S BOOKKEEPING
What was it in books, persons, observation, or experiences, etc., that stirred the mind? You give the date, describe the object, happening, or situation ... What a rich year it could be if every day precipitated even a mere crumb's worth of keeping. 1953
THINKING IN ISOLATION
By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation.To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food. 1954
THERE ARE BUT A FEW YEARS
The most important point is--and remains--not to take oneself seriously. There is no past, and, certainly, no future. There are but a few years--ten at the most. You pass your days as best you can, doing as little harm as possible. Let the desires be few and treat expectations as weeds. You read, scribble as the spirit moves you, hear some new music, see every week the few people you are attached to. Again: guard yourself, above all, against self-dramatization, a feeling of importance, and the sprouting of expectations.1954
KNOW THYSELF
It is precisely because we can never really know ourselves, but only guess, that we are so vehement about the good and the evil ascribed to us by others. In maintaining ourselves against all comers, we are maintaining something that is unknown, uncertain, and never wholly provable. We need a chorus of consent, and we are engaged in an unceasing proselytizing campaign in our own behalf. 1954
COOKING THE FACTS
How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables. 1954
SIMPLICITY
In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern. 1954
WORDINESS
A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words. 1954
EXAGGERATE!
It is the Frenchman's readiness to exaggerate that is at the root of his intellectual lucidity and also of his capacity for acknowledging merit. The English were not afraid to exaggerate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they were then not far behind the French in the lucidity of their thinking.... There is hardly a single instance of cultural vigor marked by moderation in expression. 1955
TIME TO THINK
It has been my experience that there is no substitute for time where thinking is concerned.Why is it so? The answer seems to be that in many cases to think means to be able to allow the mind to stray from the task at hand. The mind must be able to be "elsewhere."This needs time. 1955
UNUSED TALENTS
Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream. 1955
FACT AND OPINION
We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion. 1955
CREATIVE OBSTACLES
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. 1956
TYRANNY FOR ART'S SAKE
One is not quite certain that creativeness in the arts, literature, and science functions best in an environment of absolute freedom. Chances are that a relatively mild tyranny stimulates creativeness. 1956
A MATTER OF MOMENTS
Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble. 1956
THE ACADEMY
Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies. 1956
IN THE DARK
It is apparently vital that we should be in the dark about ourselves--not to be clear about our intentions, fears, and hopes. There is a stubborn effort in us to set up a compact screen between consciousness and the self. 1956
SCHADENFREUDE
The man of words feels better when the man of action comes to grief. There is not the least doubt that depressions have been good for the intellectual's soul. 1957
UNDERESTIMATING
To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating. 1957
WRITING AS MAGIC
Many people do not expect anything they read to make sense. They do not demand lucidity and relevance. There is a twofold reason for this attitude: First, the viewing of writing as a strange art and mysterious procedure. Such a view equates reading with listening to music. Second, the viewing of writing as something beyond our own powers--a sort of magic. Such a view predicates incomprehension, and is not disappointed by obscurity or lack of sense. 1957
LIES THAT PREVIEW TRUTH
Why is it so hard to tell the truth? Because more often than not the truth is meager and stale. By lying we, as it were, reform the world--arrange things as we would like them to be. And often indeed the lie is a preview of a new truth. 1957
OBSCURITY OF THE SELF
The only key in deciphering others is our self; and considering how obscure this self is and how dim our awareness of it, the use of it as a key in deciphering others is like using hieroglyphs to decipher hieroglyphs. 1957
WRITING AND HINTING
Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints. 1957
STALENESS
How quickly does anything we understand become stale. Perhaps this is a malady of a certain season of life. 1958
GROPING FOR IDEAS
I have never felt that I had a thought too profound for others to understand. On the contrary, it always seemed to me axiomatic that what was clear to me should be clear and easy to everyone else. This despite the fact that it often took me years to grope my way to an idea.... I can spend days and even months on a single sentence. I do not know how to skip. To think and write with me is like putting brick on brick. 1959
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
How rare it is to come across a piece of writing that is unambiguous, unqualified, and also unblurred by understatements or subtleties, and yet at the same time urbane and tolerant.It is a vice of the scientific method when applied to human affairs that it fosters hemming and hawing and a scrupulousness that easily degenerates into obscurity and meaninglessness. 1960
WALKING AND MARCHING
Flaubert and Nietzsche have emphasized the importance of standing up and walking in the process of thinking. The peripatetics were perhaps motivated by the same awareness. Yet purposeful walking--what we call marching--is an enemy of thought and is used as a powerful instrument for the suppression of independent thought and the inculcation of unquestioned obedience. 1960
INNOVATION
Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the
fact that others have already discovered these things--have even discovered them over and over again--and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways. 1960
PERSISTENCE PAYS
What counts most is holding on. The growth of a train of thought is not a direct forward flow. There is a succession of spurts separated by intervals of stagnation, frustration, and discouragement. If you hold on, there is bound to come a certain clarification. The unessential components drop off and a coherent, lucid whole begins to take shape. 1961
ORIGINALITY
Originality is not something continuous but something intermittent--a flash of the briefest duration. One must have the time and be watchful (be attuned) to catch the flash and fix it. One must know how to catch and preserve these scant flakes of gold sluiced out of the sand and rocks of everyday life. Originality does not come nugget-size. 1961
KEY SENTENCES
A good sentence is a key. It unlocks the mind of the reader. 1962
ELABORATION
As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words--two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas--a series of ideas stuck together. 1962
FAITH AND VEHEMENCE
I have never known the hunger for immortality. Nor have I ever savored fervent faith. I have not had even a single festering grievance.... I have yet known vehemence. When I expound ideas and opinions, I do so with a passion. 1964
POSITIVE THINKING
Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing. 1967
A FEW GOOD SENTENCES
Disraeli felt that "nothing could compensate his obscure youth, not even a glorious old age." Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences--nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon. 1977
PHILOSOPHY
I could never figure out--or probably did not take the trouble to figure out--what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble living out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive.1977
RETROSPECTIVE
In all my life I never competed for fortune, for a woman, or for fame. I learned to write in total isolation. My first work was also my best, and the first thing published. I neverbelonged to a circle or clique. I did not know I was writing a book until it was written.When my first book was published there was no one near me, an acquaintance let alone a friend, to congratulate me. I have never savored triumph, never won a race. 1981
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