Category: Hoffer, Eric
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Seriousness as Camouflage of the Nullity of Our Lives
Substack latest. I assess some thoughts of the stevedore and autodidact, Eric Hoffer.
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Man as Onion?
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955), p. 62, Aph. # 96: Man's being is neither profound nor sublime. To search for something deep underneath the surface in order to explain human phenomena is to discard the nutritious outer layer for a nonexistent core. Like a…
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Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, Harper, 1955, p. 61, #93: The fact of death and nothingness at the end is a certitude unsurpassed by any absolute truth ever discovered. Yet knowing this, people can be deadly serious about their prospects, grievances, duties and trespassings. The only explanation which suggests itself is that seriousness…
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The Prescient Eric Hoffer
On p. 176 of Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, a journal he kept from June 1958 to May 1959, Eric Hoffer complains that ideas do not gush from his mind, that his writing "lacks the quality of catharsis." "Yet only writing — any sort of writing — can justify my existence." He was an…
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Eric Hoffer, Contentment, and the Paradox of Plenty
Eric Hoffer as quoted in James D. Koerner, Hoffer's America (Open Court, 1973), p. 25: I need little to be contented. Two meals a day, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing each day. This to me is a full life. And this after a full day at the San Francisco waterfront…
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Eric Hoffer on the ‘Root Causes’ of Crime
Eric Hoffer as quoted in James D. Koerner, Hoffer's America (Open Court, 1973), p. 57: Poverty causes crime! That is what they are always shoving down our throats, the misbegotten bastards! What crap! Poverty does not cause crime. If it did we would have been buried in crime for most of our history . .…
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Eric Hoffer on Contentment
Eric Hoffer as quoted in James D. Koerner, Hoffer's America (Open Court, 1973), p. 25: I need little to be contented. Two meals a day, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing each day. This to me is a full life. And this after a full day at the San Francisco waterfront…
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Good Old Eric Hoffer
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, p. 161: "In the eyes of the true believer, people who have no holy cause are without backbone and character — a pushover for men of faith." The True Believer was published in 1951. I read chunks of it in the '60s and returned to it in December of 2003.…