Top 25 Quotes by Albert Schweitzer of 347 - Page 6

Who can describe the injustice and the cruelties that in the course of centuries the peoples of color of the world have suffered at the hands of Europeans?... We and our civilization are burdened, really, with a great

Who can describe the injustice and the cruelties that in the course of centuries the peoples of color of the world have suffered at the hands of Europeans?... We and our civilization are burdened, really, with a great debt. We are not free to confer benefits on these men, or not, as we please; it is our duty. Anything we give them is not benevolence but atonement.

Albert Schweitzer

Men, Hands, Color

By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.

Albert Schweitzer

Spiritual, Nature, Animal

Albert Schweitzer (1966). “The Teaching of Reverence for Life”

From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity.

Albert Schweitzer

Profound, Simplicity, Naive

Albert Schweitzer (1932). “Civilization and ethics. 3d. ed”

I still remain convinced that truth, love, peaceableness, meekness, and kindness are the violence which can master all other violence. The world will be theirs as soon as ever a sufficient number of people with purity of heart, with strength, and with perseverance think and live out the thoughts of love and truth, of meekness and peaceableness.

Albert Schweitzer

Perseverance, Kindness, Heart

Albert Schweitzer (2015). “The Light Within Us”, p.16, Open Road Media

Knowing all truth is less than doing a little bit of good.

Albert Schweitzer

Knowing, Littles, Truth Is

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

Health, Witch Doctors, Knowing

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."

Albert Schweitzer

Life, Philosophy, Want

"Kulturphilosophie"(Philosophy of Civilisation) by Albert Schweitzer, translated by C. T. Campion, Chapter 26, 1949.

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

Albert Schweitzer

Integrity, Angel, Men

Thought is the strongest thing we have.

Albert Schweitzer

Belief, Strongest

Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

Albert Schweitzer

Men, Mind Your Own Business, Devil

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.

Albert Schweitzer

Philosophical, Thinking, Animal

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.

Albert Schweitzer

Music, Laughter, Reality

A heavy guilt rests upon us for what the whites of all nations have done to the colored peoples. When we do good to them, it is not benevolence--it is atonement.

Albert Schweitzer

Race, Guilt, Done

Albert Schweitzer (1958). “A Selection of Writings of and about Albert Schweitzer”, Boston : [s.n.], 1958 (Boston : H.N. Sawyer Company)

The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.

Albert Schweitzer

Nature, Philosophical, Animal

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

Leadership, Men, Able

Albert Schweitzer (1929). “Civilization and Ethics”

To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.

Albert Schweitzer

Fall, Responsibility, Sacrifice

Albert Schweitzer, Charles Rhind Joy (1947). “Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology”, Boston : Beacon Press

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

Nature, Animal, Life Is

"Kulturphilosophie". Book by Albert Schweitzer, Vol. 2: Civilization and Ethics, 1923.

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.

Albert Schweitzer

Life, Evil, Giving

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

Albert Schweitzer

Gone, World, Helping

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him.

Albert Schweitzer

Men, Animal, Thinking Man

Albert Schweitzer (2014). “A Treasury of Albert Schweitzer”, p.69, Open Road Media

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

Tombstone, Food, Writing

Awakening of Western thought will not be complete until that thought steps outside itself and comes to an understanding with the search for a world-view as this manifests itself in the thought of mankind as a whole.

Albert Schweitzer

Views, Understanding, World

Albert Schweitzer (1932). “Civilization and ethics. 3d. ed”