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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.

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
Ability
Fact
Words
Facts
Doctrinaire
Nothing
Momentous
Matter
Offends
Way
Intellectual
Achieve

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In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.
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The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness and both these ends are reached by imitation.
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Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
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Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.
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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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Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
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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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One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.
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Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.
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Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
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Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.
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Creativity is discontent translated into arts.
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The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
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The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.
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In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.
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Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.
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Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality.
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Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.
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For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.
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I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.
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