Albert Schweitzer Quotes About Reverence For Life
-
Reverence for life, veneratio vitæ, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live.
→ -
Just as white light consists of colored rays, so reverence for life contains all the components of ethics: love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness and power to forgive.
→ -
If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.
→ -
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.
→ -
Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.
→ -
By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.
→ -
Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.
→ -
Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.
→ -
Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.
→ -
What we call love is in its essence reverence for life.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him.
→ -
Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends therefore in mysticism. To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naïve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe.
→ -
The ethic of Reverence for Life prompts us to keep each other alert to what troubles us and to speak and act dauntlessly together in discharging the responsibility that we feel. It keeps us watching together for opportunities to bring some sort of help to animals in recompense for the great misery that men inflict upon them, and thus for a moment we escape from the incomprehensible horror of existence.
→ -
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.
→ -
To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will-to-life. At the same time 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 as his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought.
→ -
By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.
→ -
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”).
→ -
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
→ -
The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used to failing.
→ -
Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.
→ -
Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.
→ -
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.
→ -
Reverence for life brings us into a spiritual relation with the world which is independent of all knowledge of the universe.
→ -
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
→
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