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How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

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
Seem
Death
Frighteningly
Seems
Spoil
Persons
Appetite
Make
Emptiness
Would
Empty
World
Whose
Dying

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Naivete in grownups is often charming but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.
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The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.
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The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
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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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Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.
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The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
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The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.
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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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It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
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Those who feel guilty are afraid and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.
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The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
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We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
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To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
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To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.
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There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
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If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.
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