Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.
Interpretation
Compassion distinguishes itself as a constant virtue in the midst of our internal struggles between good and evil.
In this quote, Eric Hoffer reflects on the complexity of human nature, where we often find ourselves torn between our good and evil impulses. Compassion, however, serves as a steady anchor that transcends these conflicting forces, suggesting that it provides a pure, unchanging quality that elevates our moral experiences and decisions.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of community service, this quote could emphasize the role of compassion in our lives.
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.
Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
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.
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
Western people ask me whether it is a paradox that I am King but support democracy. I have to tell them that in Thailand, the King is the guarantor of democracy.
A day is a miniature eternity.
The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will.
How could I bear a crown of gold when the Lord bears a crown of thorns? And bears it for me!
The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.
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