Albert Schweitzer Quotes About Life
-
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.
→ -
If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.
→ -
Man's ethics must not end with man, but should extend to the universe. He must regain the consciousness of the great Chain of Life from which he cannot be separated.
→ -
Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.
→ -
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.
→ -
If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.
→ -
Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.
→ -
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.
→ -
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.
→ -
Profound love demands a deep conception and out of this develops reverence for the mystery of life. It brings us close to all beings, to the poorest and smallest as well as all others.
→ -
Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward people, but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.
→ -
Love ... is a living reality.
→ -
The only thing of importance, when we depart, will be the traces of love we have left behind.
→ -
True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: "I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live."
→ -
Reverence for life . . . does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful . . . the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many. . . . It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.
→ -
Love . . . includes fellowship in suffering, in joy and in effort.
→ -
The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.
→ -
Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, ..., there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben” (“reverence for life”).
→ -
Eventually all things fall into place. Until then, laugh at the confusion, live for the moments, and know EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON.
→ -
Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.
→ -
Today . . . we know that all living beings who strive to maintain life and who long to be spared pain - all living beings on earth - are our neighbors.
→ -
Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.
→ -
The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.
→ -
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
→ -
Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will.
→ -
Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world - that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me - is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.
→ -
The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.
→ -
A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.
→ -
Most men are scantily nourished on a modicum of happiness and a number of empty thoughts which life lays on their plates. They are kept in the road of life through stern necessity by elemental duties which they cannot avoid.
→ -
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
→
Related Authors
-
Mahatma Gandhi Civil rights leader -
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Pastor -
Leopold Stokowski Conductor -
Albert Einstein Theoretical Physicist -
Eleanor Roosevelt Former First Lady of the United States -
Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher -
Mother Teresa Saint -
Bruno Walter Conductor -
W. Eugene Smith Photographer -
Bertrand Russell Philosopher -
Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher -
Rudolf Steiner Philosopher -
Jonathan Swift Pamphleteer -
Jimmy Carter 39th U.S. President -
-
Henry David Thoreau Author -
David Friedrich Strauss Writer -
Leonard Slatkin Conductor -
Desmond Tutu Activist -
Johann Sebastian Bach Composer