Mentor

If you wish to understand the human condition, there is no easier way than to read the books written by Eric Hoffer. His words are like a powerful tonic that restores clear thinking to a confused mind. His criticism exposes the charlatan and debunks the modern-day medicine man. His writing is accessible to anyone with an eighth grade education. You can probably learn more from his books that you can in four years of college. He teaches without teaching, without preaching, without insisting that he alone is right.

"What do I know?" --Montaigne

Hoffer's writing is often pithy, aphoristic, and insightful. A few examples:

Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence.

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Once man was tamed by the magic of priest and king, he stopped tinkering with and probing the world around him, and became a beggar--begging gods for good crops and good fortune.

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Perhaps the devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the animal nature, the dark primordial impulses, sealed in the subconscious cellars of our mind. Until we attain total humanization we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, devils--beasts masquerading as men.