Parenting & Family Quote by Eric Hoffer

Hoffer’s line is a moral provocation dressed up as consolation: don’t be so quick to crown suffering with the last word when love still has jurisdiction. “Call not” is old-school, almost biblical imperatival language, and that’s deliberate. He isn’t offering therapy-speak comfort; he’s issuing a verdict against a certain modern habit of tallying misery as if life were an expense report. “Wretched” becomes less a description of material conditions than a judgment about inner collapse.

The hinge is “whatever ills he suffers.” Hoffer, who wrote with a lifelong suspicion of mass movements and the psychological hunger that feeds them, understood deprivation as both economic and spiritual. The subtext: people become most vulnerable to despair, cynicism, and ideological capture when they are unmoored from particular, demanding attachments. A child to love is not just a warm feeling; it’s an anchor that forces you outward, into responsibility, patience, and a future that extends beyond your own grievances.

There’s also a bracing refusal of sentimental fatalism. Hoffer doesn’t claim the child cancels the “ills.” He claims it changes the category of the sufferer. The line redefines wealth as relational and wretchedness as isolation. In an era when public life increasingly rewards victimhood-as-identity, Hoffer’s insistence is sharp: pain is real, but meaning is not adjudicated solely by pain. If you can love someone who needs you, you’re not finished.