1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
“What do you think of Spinoza? For me he is the ideal example of the cosmic man. He worked as an obscure diamond cutter, disdaining fame and a place at the table of the great. He tells us the importance of understanding our emotions and suggests what causes them. Man will never be free until he is able to direct his emotions to think clearly. Only then can he control his environment and preserve his energy for creative work.”
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 26
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Albert Einstein 702
German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativi… 1879–1955Related quotes
On Seeing Plays (1990).
Context: It is mankind's discovery of language which more than any other single thing has separated him from the animal creation. Without language, what concept have we of past or future as separated from the immediate present? Without language, how can we tell anyone what we feel, or what we think? It might be said that until he developed language, man had no soul, for without language how could he reach deep inside himself and discover the truths that are hidden there, or find out what emotions he shared, or did not share, with his fellow men and women. But because this greatest gift of all gifts is in daily use, and is smeared, and battered and trivialized by commonplace associations, we too often forget the splendour of which it is capable, and the pleasures that it can give, from the pen of a master.
“A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.”
In Ethical Religion, (Madras: S. Ganesan, 1922), p. 62 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015002732066?urlappend=%3Bseq=66
1920s
Variant: A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.
“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.”
As quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 289-91.
Art Nonsense and Other Essays (1929), published by Cassell; quoted in Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit by Malcolm Yorke, published by Tauris Parke ISBN 1-86064-584-4, p. 49
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 46.