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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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind...
Author: Eric Hoffer
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...passionate intensity may serve as a substitute for confidence.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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We cannot hate those who we despise.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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To the creative individual all experience is seminal- all events are equidistant from new ideas and insights...
Author: Eric Hoffer
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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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They asked to be deceived.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The craving to change the world is perhaps a reflection of the craving to change ourselves.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than a deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The burning conviction that we have a holy duty towards others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like a giving hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. 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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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To be truly selfish one needs a degree of self-esteem. The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unattainable, envy takes the place of greed.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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To believe that if we could but have this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Add a few drops of malice to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause. "God wishes," said Calvin, "that one should put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory.".
Author: Eric Hoffer
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You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both these ends are reached by imitation.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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That hatred springs more from self-contempt than from a legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred and a guilty conscience.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave the door open to self-contempt.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Propaganda...serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
Author: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
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Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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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 their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Whence come these hatreds...? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others- and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American...is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners...Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our worthlessness we do not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. We hate then the whole world, and we would pour our wrath upon the whole of creation.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbors as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant of others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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