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.
Interpretation
Desiring more can lead to greater frustration than lacking basic needs.
This quote by Eric Hoffer highlights the paradox of human desire and dissatisfaction. It suggests that people often feel more frustrated when they have many possessions or blessings but still yearn for more, compared to those who have nothing but are content with their minimal needs. The essence of the quote centers around the concept that desire can breed dissatisfaction, often more intensely than the absence of material possessions.
In practice
In a motivational talk about overcoming feelings of inadequacy.
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 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.
It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.
He who has spent has used; he who has collected has lost; but he who has given has saved his treasure forever.
Who o'er the herd would wish to reign, Fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain! Vain as the leaf upon the stream, And fickle as a changeful dream; Fantastic as a woman's mood, And fierce as Frenzy's fever'd blood. Thou many-headed monster thing, Oh who would wish to be thy king!
A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.
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