“The Saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The Sage is a man who rids himself of his ego.”
Fingers Pointing Towards The Moon (1958)
“The Saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The Sage is a man who rids himself of his ego.”
Fingers Pointing Towards The Moon (1958)
Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)
“I believe the main task of the spirit is to free man from his ego.”
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 109
Source: The View of Life (1918), p. 5-6 part of the first essay "Life as Transcendence"
Context: Man is something that is to be overcome.
Logically considered, this, too, presents a contradiction: he who overcomes himself is admittedly the victor, but he is also the defeated. The ego succumbs to itself, when it wins; it achieves victory, when it suffers defeat. Yet the contradiction only arises when the two aspects of this unity are hardened into opposed, mutually exclusive conceptions. It is precisely the fully unified process of the moral life which overcomes and surpasses every lower state by achieving a higher one, and again transcends this latter state through one still higher. That man overcomes himself means that he reaches out beyond the bounds that the moment sets for him. There must be something at hand to be overcome, but it is only there in order to be overcome. Thus even as an ethical agent, man is the limited being that has no limit.
“The man who has the largest capacity for work and thought is the man who is bound to succeed.”
My Life and Work (1922)
1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)
Context: The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if He had said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, "I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort, and learn from my munificence to all to be kind to each other".