Albert Schweitzer Quotes

Serious illness doesn't bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host.

Aim for service and success will follow!

From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity.

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.

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.

The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of animals. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure in killing animals for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration?

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.

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.

My life is my argument.

Soldiers' graves are the greatest preachers of peace.

Preservation of life is the only true joy.

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.

A man does not have to be an angel in order to be saint.

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.

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

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.

Do something good and someone might imitate it.

Man has become a superman ... because he not only disposes oinnate, physical forces, but because he is in command ... olatent forces in nature and because he can put them to his service.... But the essential fact we must surely all feel in our hearts ... is that we are becoming inhuman in proportion as we become supermen.

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

Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.

That's my private ant. You're liable to break its legs.

He who does not reflect his life back to God in gratitude does not know himself.

We are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live his life for himself alone.

In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.

The path of awakening is not about becoming who you are. Rather it is about unbecoming who you are not.

God much are the truly wealthy. So our inner happiness depends not on what we experience but on the degree of our gratitude to God, Gratitude — the Secret of Life.

My life carries its own meaning in itself.

What really matters is that we should all of us realize that we are guilty of inhumanity. The horror of this realization should shakes us out of our lethargy so that we can direct our hopes and our intentions to the coming of an era in which war will have no place.

We need a boundless ethics which will include animals also.

The greatest living person in the world is some individual who at this very moment has gone in love to help another.

Because I have confidence in the power of truth and in the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind. Affirmation of the world and of life contains within itself an optimistic willing and hoping which can never be lost. It is, therefore, never afraid to face the dismal reality and to see it as it really is.

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 result of the voyage does not depend on the speed of the ship, but on whether or not it keeps a true course.

The three most important ways to lead people are:... by example... by example... by example.

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.

Example is leadership.

Do something for somebody everyday for which you do not get paid.

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.

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

I decided that I would make my life my argument.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

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.

For those who sincerely seek the truth should not fear the outcome.

Animal protection is education to the humanity.

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.

Affirmation of the world, which means affirmation of the will-to-live that manifests itself around me, is only possible if I devote myself to other life.

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.

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.