“For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence”

— Blaise Pascal

Discourses on the Condition of the Great
Context: All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

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Blaise Pascal144

French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Chri… 1623–1662

Alfred Bester book The Stars My Destination

Source: The Stars My Destination

“Each individual imagines that he can exist, live, think, and act for himself, and believes that he himself is the thinking principle of his thoughts; whereas in truth he is but a single ray of the ONE universal and necessary Thought.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 21

“But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

Source: 1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)

“The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

“I set to do you—each one of you, individually and in private—what I hold to be the greatest possible service. I tried to persuade each one of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and rational as possible.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

36c6, as cited in Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995), p. 90
Plato, Apology

“At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

“To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Benjamin Rush (12 April 1803) https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-40-02-0178-0001 <br class="br">1800s, First Presidential Administration (1801&ndash;1805)

“Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you. The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself, and he is the one who has made it all.”

Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet

“Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

“There is no happiness without forgetfulness. I have never known a real man of action to be unhappy during action. How could he be? Like a child at play, he stops thinking of himself.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness

“For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence”

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Blaise Pascal144

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