Albert Schweitzer
Every patient carries his or her own doctor inside.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Men
In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.Collection: Struggle
The thinking man must oppose all cruelties no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo.Collection: Men
In the same way as the tree bears the same fruit year after year, but each time new fruit, all lastingly valuable ideas in thinking must always be reborn.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Kindness
But merely accepting authoritarian truth, even if that truth has some virtue, does not bring skepticism to an end. To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon retards the advance of reason. Our world rots in deceit. . . . Just as a tree bears the same fruit year after year and at the same time fruit that is new each year, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually created anew in thought. But our age pretends to make a sterile tree bear fruit by tying fruits of truth onto its branches.Collection: Our World
Bach is thus a terminal point. Nothing comes from him; everything merely leads to him.Collection: Terminal
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.Collection: Inspiring
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Flower
Reverence for life, veneratio vitæ, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live.Collection: Achievement
Love . . . includes fellowship in suffering, in joy and in effort.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Christian
If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.Collection: Life
Therapy is the boat across the river, but most don't want to get off. Don't blame, forgive, All healing is self-healingCollection: Leadership
But the others, those who tried to bring Jesus to life at the call of love, found it a cruel task to be honest. The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Men
Any profound view of the world is mysticism. It has, of course, to deal with life and the world, both of which are nonrational entities.Collection: Views
Where possible Paul avoids quoting the teaching of Jesus, in fact even mentioning it. If we had to rely on Paul, we should not know that Jesus taught in parables, had delivered the sermon on the mount, and had taught His disciples the 'Our Father.' Even where they are specially relevant, Paul passes over the words of the Lord.Collection: Jesus
I am conscious that meat eatingis not in accordance with the finer feelings,and I abstain from it whenever I can.Collection: Feelings
Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility with regard to everything that has life.Collection: Respect
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.Collection: Jesus
Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.Collection: Civilization
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Responsibility
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Jesus
The city of truth cannot be built on the swampy ground of skepticism.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Views
We are compelled by the commandment of love contained in our hearts and thought, and proclaimed by Jesus, to give rein to our natural sympathy for animals. We are also compelled to help them and spare them suffering.Collection: Jesus
My life carries its own meaning in itself.Collection: Life
All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.Collection: Inspirational
Let your life be your argument.Collection: Basketball
The three most important ways to lead people are:... by example... by example... by example.Collection: Leadership
The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used to failing.Collection: Success
Do not lose heart, even if you must wait a bit before finding the right thing. Be prepared for disappointment also, but do not abandon the quest.Collection: Disappointment
To me, good health is more than just exercise and diet. Its really a point of view and a mental attitude you have about yourself.Collection: Attitude
An idea is, in the end, always stronger than circumstances.Collection: Ideas
Don't let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Needs
Man can no longer live his life for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: God
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.Collection: Inspirational