“The ego can be found in the heart, which in turn is the mother of all desires.”

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)
Context: I think one of the best ways to face this problem of self-centeredness is to discover some cause and some purpose, some loyalty outside of yourself and give yourself to that something. The best way to handle it is not to suppress the ego but to extend the ego into objectively meaningful channels. And so many people are unhappy because they aren’t doing anything. They’re self-centered because they aren’t doing anything. They haven’t given themselves to anything and they just move around in their little circles. One of the ways to rise above this self-centeredness is to move away from self and objectify yourself in something outside of yourself. Find some great cause and some great purpose, some loyalty to which you can give yourself and become so absorbed in that something that you give your life to it. Men and women have done this throughout all of the generations. And they have found that necessary ego satisfaction that life presents and that one desires through projecting self in something outside of self. As I said, you don’t solve the problem by trying to trample over the ego altogether. That doesn’t solve the problem. For you will always have the ego and the ego has certain desires, certain desires for significance. The three great psychoanalysts of this age, of this century, pointed out that there are certain basic desires that human beings have and that they long for and that they seek at any cost. And so for Freud the basic desire was to be loved. Jung would say that the basic desire is to be secure. But then Adler comes along and says the basic desire of human nature is to feel important and a sense of significance. And I think of all of those, probably- certainly all are significant but the one that Adler mentions is probably even more significant than any: that all human beings have a desire to belong and to feel significant and important. And the way to solve this problem is not to drown out the ego but to find your sense of importance in something outside of the self. And you are then able to live because you have given your life to something outside and something that is meaningful, objectified. You rise above this self-absorption to something outside. This is the way to go through life with a balance, with the proper perspective because you’ve given yourself to something greater than self. Sometimes it’s friends, sometimes it’s family, sometimes it’s a great cause, it’s a great loyalty, but give yourself to that something and life becomes meaningful.

Source: Why We Broke Up

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

A Prayer for Indifference, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Srimad Bhagavad Gita, Ch. I-VI, 2013
Context: In this verse Lord Krishna advises Arjuna how to fight the battle he is trying to avoid. Life in the world functions by ego, attachment and desire, which gives the rise to the idea of “likes” and “dislikes”. In this way the mind starts identifying all experiences in the world in terms of opposites, such as pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat... Here, Sri Krishna is saying that if Arjuna has neither desire for heaven nor for sovereignty over the earth, then he should achieve equanimity of the mind. With equanimity of the mind one can achieve success in the war of life. Without it, one cannot remain unaffected by the pairs of opposites and will be continually tossed about by the waves of egocentric likes and dislikes.

Source: The New Dietetics, What to Eat and How: A Guide to Scientific Feeding in Health and Disease, Battle Creek, MI: The Modern Medicine Publishing Co., 1921, p. 366 https://books.google.it/books?id=TNsMAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA366.

Source: Blood Bound