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When a man has been preoccupied with himself throughout his lifetime, when he is intent solely on his personal salvation, when he no longer thinks of other seekers' welfare because he is too engaged with his own, the danger is that his spiritual attainment, when and if it comes, will be kept for himself too. This is why Philosophy rejects the egocentric ideal of the lower mysticism and why it trains its votaries from the very start to work altruistically for humanity's enlightenment. No man is so low in the evolutionary scale that he cannot help some other men with a rightly placed word, cannot strike a flickering match in their darkness, cannot show the example of a better life.

-- Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 4 : Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > # 218