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What counts most is holding on. The growth of a train of thought is not a direct forward flow. There is a succession of spurts separated by intervals of stagnation, frustration, and discouragement. If you hold on, there is bound to come a certain clarification. The unessential components drop off and a coherent, lucid whole begins to take shape.
Eric Hoffer
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The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.
Eric Hoffer
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A good sentence is a key. It unlocks the mind of the reader.
Eric Hoffer
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It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.
Eric Hoffer
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The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul, is somehow the offspring of resistance — of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom.
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Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.
Eric Hoffer
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Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble.
Eric Hoffer
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Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.
Eric Hoffer
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A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
Eric Hoffer
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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.
Eric Hoffer
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Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
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Youth itself is a talent – a perishable talent.
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It is a juvenile notion that a society needs a lofty purpose and a shining vision to achieve much. Both in the market place and on the battlefield men who set their hearts on toys have often displayed unequal initiative and drive. And one must be ignorant of the creative process to look for a close correspondence between motive and achievement in the world of thought and imagination.
Eric Hoffer
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The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Eric Hoffer
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The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new... is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear. It is the misfits, failures, fugitives, outcasts and their like who are among the first to grapple with the new.
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I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.
Eric Hoffer
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It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is as true of men as of dogs.
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A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.
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Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
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The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than of deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.
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It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent De Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so that the poor "will forgive them the bread you give them."
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Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things — have even discovered them over and over again — and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways.
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More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.
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Thinking with me is like looking for a person whose address I don't know. I stand on a street corner all day long waiting for him to pass by. Certainly there are more efficient ways of locating a person whose address you don't know. But if you have a whole lifetime to wait and enjoy watching things go by, then waiting on street corners is as good a method as any. If you don't find the person you are looking for, you might meet someone else.
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Perhaps people throw themselves into heated polemics to give content to their lives, to warm their hearts. What Luther said of hatred is true of all quarreling. There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting.
Eric Hoffer
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Eric Hoffer
Born:
July 25, 1898
Died:
May 21, 1983
(aged 84)
Bio:
Eric Hoffer was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983.
Known for:
The Ordeal of Change (1963)
The Passionate State of Mind (1955)
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
The temper of our time (1967)
Most used words:
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power
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time
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