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In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.

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
Counts
Pursuit
Object
Passionate
Objects
Every
Pursued

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Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.
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The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else--we are the busiest people in the world.
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Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs.
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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.
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The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
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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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It is not at all simple to understand the simple.
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It is thus with most of us we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
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One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
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The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.
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If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.
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The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
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What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.
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All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
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Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance - a flailing of the arms to to regain one's balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.
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First something is a great idea, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business and finally it becomes a racket.
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When the Greeks said, Whom the gods love die young, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die young and playful.
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If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.
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The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
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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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