Quote

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

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
Causes
Ideal
Story
Search
Eminently
Purpose
Patterns
Storyteller
Stories
Basically
Largely
Without
Ideals
Pattern
Men
Meaning
Mission
Life
Development
Plot
Like
Cause
Missions

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The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.
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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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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.
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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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EVERY intense desire is perhaps basically a desire to be different from what we are.
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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.
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It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.
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Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life.
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There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
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It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.
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We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact
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Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
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A man's worth is what he is divided by what he thinks he is.
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Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.
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When you automate an industry you modernize it when you automate a life you primitivize it.
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Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
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An empty head is not really empty it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
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