“One knows from daily life that one exists for other people…”
–Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
Swiss physicist
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Sales inspiration…
So many of our SalesQuotes are hidden within greater thoughts and passages. The quote above is pulled from the excerpt below from Einstein’s essay, The World as I See It (in his book Ideas and Opinions).
“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people – first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”
Einstein was a Smover.
* Smoving: verb: smiling & moving
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Sometimes we get feedback from people who feel Einstein was German or American.
Here’s what we know… He was born in Germany and moved to Switzerland at the age of 17. Five years later (1901), he acquired his Swiss citizenship. Apparently in 1914, he became a German citizen but “renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America.” In 1940, he became a U.S. citizen. (according to the Nobel Foundation).
That combined with the following quotation in a letter he wrote to Alfred Kneser in 1918 had us believing he would much prefer being referred to as Swiss rather than German.
“I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.”