Quote

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

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
Persons
Dissatisfied
Person
Dissatisfaction
Much
Opposed
Revolutionary
Genuine
Products
Artist
Distills
Art
Diametrically

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When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.
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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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It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.
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Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.
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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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The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.
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Children are the keys of paradise.
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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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In a trader-dominated society, the scribe is usually kept out of the management of affairs, but it given a more or less free hand in the cultural field. By frustrating the scribe's craving for commanding action, the trader draws upon himself the scribe's wrath and scorn.
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Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
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We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
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A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
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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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It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.
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The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
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We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
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Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.
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Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.
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No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments.
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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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