Human interests are only means

Men fight for their personal or communal or national interests or for ideas and principles of which they make watchwords and battle-cries. But the largest human interests are only means and instruments which some Force greater than themselves breaks or uses in its inconscient impulse or else for its conscious purposes; ideas and principles are births of our minds which are born, reign and pass away and they are mere words unless they express some power of our being and of world-being which finds in them a mental self-expression.

Something there is greater than our thoughts and desires, something more constant and insistent which lasts and grows beyond and yet by their changings.

Ref: Human Cycle