Top 100 Albert Schweitzer Quotes
#1. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#2. One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.
Albert Schweitzer
#3. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#4. The Christ of Theology is not alive for us today. He is wrapped in the grave cloths of dogma.
Albert Schweitzer
#5. Reverence for life, veneratio vitae, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live.
Albert Schweitzer
#6. Faith which refuses to face indisputable facts is but little faith. Truth is always gain, however hard it is to accommodate ourselves to it. To linger in any kind of untruth proves to be a departure from the straight way of faith.
Albert Schweitzer
#8. Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.
Albert Schweitzer
#9. 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?
Albert Schweitzer
#10. Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.
Albert Schweitzer
#11. At 20 everyone has the face that God gave them, at 40 the face that life gave them, and at 60 the face they earned.
Albert Schweitzer
#12. The only way out of today's misery is for people to become worthy of each other's trust.
Albert Schweitzer
#13. In case my life should end with the cannibals, I hope they will write on my tombstone, 'We have eaten Dr. Schweitzer. He was good to the end.'
Albert Schweitzer
#15. Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe.
Albert Schweitzer
#16. I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.
Albert Schweitzer
#17. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#18. I used to suffer particularly because the poor animals must endure so much pain and want. The sight of an old, limping horse being dragged along by one man while another man struck him with
a stick he was being driven to the Colmar slaughterhouse - haunted me for weeks.
Albert Schweitzer
#19. The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.
Albert Schweitzer
#21. The fellowship of those who bear the mark of pain: who are the members of this Fellowship? Those who have learnt by experience what physical pain and bodily anguish mean, belong together all the world over; they are united by a secret bond.
Albert Schweitzer
#25. Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.
Albert Schweitzer
#26. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.
Albert Schweitzer
#27. Renunciation of thinking is a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.
Albert Schweitzer
#29. You must learn to understand the secret of gratitude. It is more than just so-called virtue. It is revealed to you as a mysterious law of existence. In obedience to it we have to fulfill our destiny.
Albert Schweitzer
#30. The path of awakening is not about becoming who you are. Rather it is about unbecoming who you are not.
Albert Schweitzer
#32. There can be no Kingdom of God in the world without the Kingdom of God in our hearts.
Albert Schweitzer
#33. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#35. Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
#36. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#37. What has been presented as Christianity during these nineteen centuries is only a beginning, full of mistakes, not full blown Christianity springing from the spirit of Jesus.
Albert Schweitzer
#38. I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.
Albert Schweitzer
#39. The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.
Albert Schweitzer
#40. Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.
Albert Schweitzer
#41. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#42. The the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hope are optimistic.
Albert Schweitzer
#44. Every start on an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to succeed.
Albert Schweitzer
#45. It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed.
Albert Schweitzer
#46. There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.
Albert Schweitzer
#47. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#48. The city of truth cannot be built on the swampy ground of skepticism.
Albert Schweitzer
#49. It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth.
Albert Schweitzer
#50. Even if it is a little thing, do something for those who have need of help.
Albert Schweitzer
#51. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#52. It doesn't matter if an animal can reason. It matters only that it is capable of suffering and that is why I consider it my neighbor.
Albert Schweitzer
#53. Every person I have known who has been truly happy has learned how to serve others.
Albert Schweitzer
#55. Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.
Albert Schweitzer
#56. The gratitude that we encounter helps us believe in the goodness of the world, and strengthens us thereby to do what's good.
Albert Schweitzer
#58. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#59. For us the great men are not those who solved the problems, but those whodiscovered them.
Albert Schweitzer
#60. I do not know what your destiny may be, but I do know this, that not one of you will find the happiness that each of you is seeking until you have first sought and found a way in which to unselfishly serve others.
Albert Schweitzer
#61. The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature.
Albert Schweitzer
#62. My view is that we stand up for treating the animals in a considerate way, for completely renouncing the eating of meat and also for speaking out against it. This is what I do myself. And in this way many a one becomes aware of a problem that was put forward so late.
Albert Schweitzer
#63. The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us succeed. Each patient carries his or her own doctor inside him or her. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.
Albert Schweitzer
#64. Bach is played altogether too fast. Music that presupposes a visual comprehension of lines of sound advancing side by side becomes chaos for the listener; high speed makes comprehension impossible. Yet
Albert Schweitzer
#65. The African is my brother but he is my younger brother by several centuries.
Albert Schweitzer
#66. The interior joy we feel when we have done a good deed is the nourishment the soul requires.
Albert Schweitzer
#67. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#68. The only ones who will find real happiness are those who find a way to serve
Albert Schweitzer
#69. Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
Albert Schweitzer
#70. Only those who respect the personality of others can be of real use to them.
Albert Schweitzer
#71. We must never allow the voice of humanity within us to be silenced. It is humanity's sympathy with all creatures that first makes us truly human.
Albert Schweitzer
#72. The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.
Albert Schweitzer
#74. An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight ... the truly wise person is colorblind.
Albert Schweitzer
#75. Man has the lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end up destroying the earth.
Albert Schweitzer
#76. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#77. Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.
Albert Schweitzer
#78. The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation, and in every way a puzzling manifestation, of the universal will to live.
Albert Schweitzer
#81. Our degeneration, when it is traced back to its origin in our view of the world really consists in the fact that true optimism has vanished unperceived from our midst.
Albert Schweitzer
#83. 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 have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer
#84. The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.
Albert Schweitzer
#85. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#86. The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed.
Albert Schweitzer
#87. Jesus as a concrete historical personality remains a stranger to our time, but His spirit, which lies hidden in His words, is known in simplicity, and its influence is direct.
Albert Schweitzer
#88. Where principles and heart stand in conflict with each other, let us make the law of the spirit free from the law of principles.
Albert Schweitzer
#89. Day by day we should weigh what we have granted to the spirit of the world against what we have denied to the spirit of Jesus, in thought and especially in deed.
Albert Schweitzer
#90. Seek always to do some good, somewhere ... Even if it's a little thing, so something for those that need help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.
Albert Schweitzer
#91. I am life which wants to live admidst of lives that want to live.
Albert Schweitzer
#92. Nature compels us to recognize the fact of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the other lives who are linked to it. In the very fibers of our being, we bear within ourselves the fact of the solidarity of life.
Albert Schweitzer
#94. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#95. I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words.
Albert Schweitzer
#96. Do something for somebody everyday for which you do not get paid.
Albert Schweitzer
#97. 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.
Albert Schweitzer
#98. We all know how important love is, yet how often is it really emoted or exhibited? What so many sick people in this world suffer from-loneliness, boredom and fear-can't be cured with a pill.
Albert Schweitzer
#99. Those who experiment on animals should never be able to quiet their own conscience by telling themselves that these cruelties have a worthy aim.
Albert Schweitzer
#100. You don't live in a world all alone. Your brothers are here too.
Albert Schweitzer
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