We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that everyone has personal struggles, but those who seek public attention for them can often become disruptive.
Eric Hoffer's quote speaks to the nature of human suffering and the different ways people cope with their private problems. While everyone experiences difficulties and personal challenges, the true trouble arises when individuals seek validation or solutions through public means, which can lead to disruptive behavior affecting others. It highlights the importance of addressing one's issues privately and reflects on the societal impact of seeking public cures for personal ailments.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about mental health awareness to emphasize the importance of private healing.
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
The violence of the Left is symbolic, the injuries are not intended. The violence of the Right is real - directed at people, designed to cause injuries. Vietnam, nuclear weapons, police out of control are intentional forms of violence. The violence from the Right is aimed directly at people and the violence from the Left is aimed at institutions and symbols.
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I've been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I've been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I've been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I've known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion. ...I've been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough.
The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind.
You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.
America is made of different races and different religions, but we're all co-travelers on the spaceship Earth and must respect and help each other along the way.
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