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The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.

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
Lose
Loses
Desire
Partly
Belong
Oneself

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To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.
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The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.
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There is no alienation that a little power will not cure.
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people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.
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Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.
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Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.
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We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
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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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We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
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The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
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However much we guard against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.
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People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
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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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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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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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No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments.
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The devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the nature that is within us- the infinitely ferocious and cunning prehuman creature that is still within us, sealed in the subconscious cellars of the psyche.
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What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.
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The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.
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