Top 353 Quotes & Sayings by Albert Schweitzer - Page 5

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. Extract from 'Memories of childhood and youth.'

Every patient carries his or her own doctor inside.

To the truly ethical man, all of life is sacred, including forms of life that from the human point of view may seem lower than ours.

There is within each of us a modulation, an inner exaltation, which lifts us above the buffetings with which events assail us. Likewise, it lifts us above dependence upon the gifts of events for our joy.

It is a man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.

If you truly desire happiness, seek and learn how to serve.

No man need fear death, he need fear only that he may die without having known his greatest power: the power of his free will to give his life for others

Hear our humble prayer, O God. Make us, ourselves, to be true friends to the animals.

We cannot understand what happens in the universe. What is glorious in it is united with what is full of horror. What is full of meaning is united to what is senseless. The spirit of the universe is at once creative and destructive — it creates while it destroys and destroys while it creates, and therefore it remains to us a riddle. And we must inevitably resign ourselves to this.

If the extension of your compassion does not include all living beings, then you will be unable to find peace by yourself.

Think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flames within us.

When we observe contemporary society one thing strikes us. We debate but make no progress. Why? Because as peoples we do not yet trust each other.

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. ... But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own... He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.

The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery.

The friend of nature is the man who feels himself inwardly united with everything that lives in nature, who shares in the fate of all creatures, helps them when he can in their pain and need, and as far as possible avoids injuring or taking life.

Love . . . includes fellowship in suffering, in joy and in effort.

Does my behavior in respect of love affect nothing? That is because there is not enough love in me.

Ideals are thoughts. So long as they exist merely as thoughts, the power in them remains ineffective.

Love ... is a living reality.

It is only through love that we can attain to communion with God. All living knowledge of God rests upon this foundation: that we experience him in our lives as Will-to-love.

I see in him (Dr. Max Gerson) one of the most eminent medical geniuses in the history of medicine...he was greatly impeded by adverse political conditions.

Reverence for life brings us into a spiritual relation with the world which is independent of all knowledge of the universe.

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice

Grow into your ideals so that life cannot rob you of them.

A man who possesses a veneration of life will not simply say his prayers. He will throw himself into the battle to preserve life, if for no other reason than that he himself is an extension of life around him.

Be faithful to your love and you mill be recompensed beyond measure.

Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. ... humanity meaning consideration for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings.

Your life is something opaque, not transparent, as long as you look at it in an ordinary human way. But if you hold it up against the light of God's goodness, it shines and turns transparent, radiant and bright. And then you ask yourself in amazement: Is this really my own life I see before me?

My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see.

Soldiers' graves are the greatest preachers of peace.

Kindness works simply and perseveringly; it produces no strained relations which prejudice its working; strained relations which already exist it relaxes. Mistrust and misunderstanding it puts to flight, and it strengthens itself by calling forth answering kindness. Hence it is the furthest reaching and the most effective of all forces.

The gratitude that we encounter helps us believe in the goodness of the world, and strengthens us thereby to do what's good.

Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life.

The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil.

Not less strong than the will to truth must be the will to sincerity. Only an age, which can show the courage of sincerity, can possess truth, which works as a spiritual force within it.

Living truth is that alone which has its origins in thinking. Just as a tree bears year after year the same fruit which is each year new, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually born again in thought.

Truth has not special time of its own. Its hour is now - always and, indeed then most truly, when it seems unsuitable to actual circumstances.

Once a man recognizes himself as a being surrounded by other beings in this world and begins to respect his life and take it to the highest value, he becomes a thinking being. Then he values other lives and experiences them as part of his own life. With that, his goal is to help everyone take their life to the highest value; anything which limits or destroys a life is evil. That is morality. That is how men are related to the world around them.

Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it.

All people are endowed with the faculty of compassion, and for this reason can develop the humanitarian spirit.

If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.

I do not believe that we can put into anyone ideas which are not in him already. As a rule there are in everyone all sorts of good ideas, ready like tinder. But much of this tinder catches fire, or catches it successfully, only when it meets some flame or spark from outside, i.e., from some other person.

The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach.

We need a boundless ethics which will include animals also.

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

The thinking man must oppose all cruelties no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo.

I have given up the ambition to be a great scholar. I want to be more- simply a human. . . . We are not true humans, but beings who live by a civilization inherited from the past, that keeps us hostage, that confines us. No freedom of movement. Nothing. Everything in us is killed by our calculations for our future, by our social position and cast. You see, I am not happy-yet I am happy. I suffer, but that is part of life. I live, I don't care about my existence, and that is the beginning of wisdom.

In the past we have tried to make a distinction between animals which we acknowledge have some value and other which, having none, can be liquidated when we wish. This standard must be abandoned. Everything that lives has value simply as a living thing, as one of the manifestations of the mystery that is life.

It is through the idealism of youth that man catches sight of truth, and in that idealism he possesses a wealth which he must never exchange for anything else.

Mysticism occurs whenever a human being sees the separation between the natural and the supernatural, between the temporal and the eternal, as overcome.

What does Reverence for Life say abut the relations between [humanity] and the animal world? Whenever I injury any kind of life I must be quite certain that it is necessary. I must never go beyond the unavoidable, not even in apparently insignificant things. The farmer who has mowed down a thousand flowers in his meadow in order to feed his cows must be careful on his way home not to strike the head off a single flower by the side of the road in idle amusement, for he thereby infringes on the law of life without being under the pressure of necessity.

Who shall enumerate the many ways in which that costly piece of fixed capital, a human being , may be employed! More of him is wanted everywhere! Hunt, then, for some situation in which your humanity may be used.

In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.

Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from him and flows through our being also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.

The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.

The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.

The future of civilization depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness which characterize the thoughts and convictions of men today, and reaching a state of fresh hope and fresh determination.

I look back upon my youth and realize how so many people gave me help, understanding, courage - very important things to me - and they never knew it. They entered into my life and became powers within me.

It seemed to me a matter of course that we should all take our share of the burden of pain which lies upon the world.