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Eric Hoffer -
The Passionate State of Mind (1955)
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Pride is a sense of worth derived from something that is not organically part of us, while self-esteem derives from the potentialities and achievements of the self. We are proud when we identify ourselves with an imaginary self, a leader, a holy cause, a collective body or possessions. There is fear and intolerance in pride; it is sensitive and uncompromising. The less promise and potency in the self, the more imperative is the need for pride. The core of pride is self-rejection.
It is true that when pride releases energies and serves as a spur to achievement, it can lead to a reconciliation with the self and the attainment of genuine self-esteem.
Eric Hoffer
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To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Eric Hoffer
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The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
Eric Hoffer
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Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
Eric Hoffer
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There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
Eric Hoffer
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Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.
Eric Hoffer
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With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
Eric Hoffer
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Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, where Faith obtains its more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases, the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is - automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will.
Eric Hoffer
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It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.
Eric Hoffer
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Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
Eric Hoffer
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Vehemence is the expression of a blind effort to support and uphold something that can never stand on its own... Whether it our own meaningless self we are upholding, or some doctrine devoid of evidence, we can do it only in a frenzy of faith.
Eric Hoffer
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The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.
Eric Hoffer
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The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations.
Eric Hoffer
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Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.
Eric Hoffer
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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.
Eric Hoffer
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The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
Eric Hoffer
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What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?
Eric Hoffer
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Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.
Eric Hoffer
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A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
Eric Hoffer
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Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.
Eric Hoffer
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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.
Eric Hoffer
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Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
Eric Hoffer
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The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.
Eric Hoffer
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It is not at all simple to understand the simple.
Eric Hoffer
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Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.
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)
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