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An easygoing person is probably more accessible to the realization of eternity--the endless flow of life and death--than one who takes his prospects and duties overseriously. It is the overserious who are truly frivolous.

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
Person
Eternity
Easygoing
Life
Flow
Frivolity
Truly
Frivolous
Duty
Prospects
Takes
Accessible
Probably
Duties
Death
Realization
Persons
Endless

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Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.
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God alone is satisfied with what He is and can proclaim: I am what I am. Unlike God, man strives with all his might to be what he is not. He incessantly proclaims: I am what I am not.
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Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.
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When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
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Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.
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Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.
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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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The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.
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A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
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To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
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Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.
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Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance.
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Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.
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To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats- we know it not.
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For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.
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Faith is primarily a process of identification the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal.
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The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
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