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There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

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
Believer
Enormously
Gains
Utmost
Humility
Selfless
Doubt
Centered
Practice
Boundless
Self
Vanity
Even
Gain
Life
Esteem
Exchanging

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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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Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.
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Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
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Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.
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To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
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Fair play is primarily not blaming others for anything that is wrong with us.
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Communists are frustrated capitalists.
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Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.
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Children are the keys of paradise.
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A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
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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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Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
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