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The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility
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
Poverty
Borderline
Struggle
Purposeful
Food
Futility
Poor
Starvation
Free
Wholly
Lives
Shelter
Sense
Desperate
Live
Engaged
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.
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Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.
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Help your sister's boat across the water, and yours too will reach the other side. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
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A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
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We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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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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Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.
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The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
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The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.
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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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The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.
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A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.
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Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.
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The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
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We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
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A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life
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Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute for the one thing we really want and cannot have.
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The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
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When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
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