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There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
Eric Hoffer
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Eric Hoffer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 25
Died: 1983
Died: May 21
Philosopher
Psychologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Away
Pursuer
Earmarks
Fugitive
Shrinking
Passions
Passionate
Passion
Literature
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.
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Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.
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The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.
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A man's worth is what he is divided by what he thinks he is.
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The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.
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God alone is satisfied with what He is and can proclaim: I am what I am. Unlike God, man strives with all his might to be what he is not. He incessantly proclaims: I am what I am not.
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The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
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The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth
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A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
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No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments.
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Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.
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The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
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The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.
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Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.
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We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.
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Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.
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The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.
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Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.
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When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
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It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
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