| 268 Famous Quotes by Eric Hoffer
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“It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.”
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“To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.”
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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.”
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“The well-adjusted make poor prophets.”
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“One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes.Children, savages, and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.”
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“...there is no alienation that a little power will not cure.”
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“Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.”
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“The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breeds pride and arrogance.”
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“Take man's most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.”
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“We usually see only the things we are looking for- so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.”
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“The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.”
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“When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.”
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“Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or our worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter worthlessness can be a source of courage.”
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“There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.”
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“In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on- can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”
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“There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind...”
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“...passionate intensity may serve as a substitute for confidence.”
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“To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.”
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“We cannot hate those who we despise.”
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“To the creative individual all experience is seminal- all events are equidistant from new ideas and insights...”
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“The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.”
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“Nature attains perfection, but man never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.”
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“The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.”
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“The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and function without him. This is true not only of the writer, artist and scientist, but of creators in other fields...With the noncreative it is the other way around: in whatever they do, they arrange things so that they themselves become indispensable.”
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“Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others.”
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Eric Hoffer Quotes, Quotations, and Sayings
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