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Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.

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
Lack
Cause
Causes
Opportunity
Paucity
Potent
Unlimited
Frustration
Opportunities

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The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
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The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.
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In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.
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Children are the keys of paradise.
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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.
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When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
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It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.
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We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
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The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.
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What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.
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It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
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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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It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
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The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new . . . is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear. It is the misfits, failures, fugitives, outcasts and their like who are among the first to grapple with the new.
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Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
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Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.
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Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.
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We usually see only the things we are looking for- so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.
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