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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
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
Meaning
Outside
Lives
Compensate
Others
Obsession
Life
Attempt
World
Passionate
Lack
Private
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.
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Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.
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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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The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.
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The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.
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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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There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
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To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
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Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.
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Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.
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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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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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However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
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You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others - that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.
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Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.
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Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.
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America is still the best country for the common man -- white or black ... if he can't make it here he won't make it anywhere else.
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The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.
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We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
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The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.
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