Life & Wisdom Quote by Eric Hoffer

There is a sly compliment embedded in Hoffer's diagnosis, and it comes with a sting. Calling humans the only creatures who "strive to surpass" themselves frames ambition as our signature trait, but pairing it with a "yearn for the impossible" turns that pride into a liability. The line works because it refuses to decide whether the impossible is a horizon that pulls civilization forward or a mirage that keeps people restless, manipulable, and perpetually dissatisfied.

Hoffer wrote as a longshoreman-intellectual who watched mass movements up close: how ordinary lives, pressed by boredom, humiliation, or stagnation, become combustible when offered a grand purpose. In that light, "surpass himself" isn't just self-help grit; it's a psychological itch that can be scratched by ideology as easily as by art or science. The "impossible" is deliberately vague, a blank check that can be cashed as utopia, purity, national destiny, personal reinvention. Vagueness is the point: it captures the human habit of turning discomfort into metaphysics.

The subtext is a warning about scale. Animals adapt; humans escalate. We don't merely want a better shelter, we want meaning that justifies the shelter, the sacrifice, the whole messy story of being alive. That hunger produces cathedrals, revolutions, space programs, and self-made myths. It also produces resentment when reality won't match the script. Hoffer's sentence is compact because it's not advice; it's a portrait of a species forever auditioning for a role it invented.