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The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.
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
Take
Seriously
Flow
Importance
Capacity
Creativity
Dries
Creative
Inverse
Left
Compulsion
Self
Proportion
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However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
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The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse.
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Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
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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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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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It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
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The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unobtainable, envy takes the place of greed.
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When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.
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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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A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
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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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...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.
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The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.
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Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.
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There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
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