Albert Schweitzer Quotes: 126 Timeless Insights on Music, Cats, Encounters, and Happiness

“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

Source: Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics, Chapter 26 "The Civilizing Power of the Ethics of Reverence for Life"

Life

“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. Man can no longer live 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.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 248

Life , Secret , Nature

“The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.”

Albert Schweitzer

Variant: The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Life , Help

“Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 164
Context: Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it. A strength which becomes clearer and stronger through its experience of such obstacles is the only strength that can conquer them. Resistance is only a waste of strength.

People , Way

“The doctor of the future will be oneself.”

Albert Schweitzer

Future

“No ray of sunshine is ever lost but the green that it awakens takes time to sprout, and it is not always given the sower to see the harvest.”

Albert Schweitzer

Time

“Soldiers' graves are the greatest preachers of peace.”

Albert Schweitzer

Peace

“The demands of Jesus are difficult because they require us to do something extraordinary. At the same time He asks us to regard these [acts of goodness] as something usual, ordinary.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Time

“I am life which wants to live admidst of lives that want to live.”

Albert Schweitzer

Ich bin Leben, das leben will, inmitten von Leben, das leben will.
Reverence for Life (1969)
Source: Die Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben http://books.google.pl/books?id=q7MCqUIN7hkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, C.H.Beck, 2008, p. 111

Life

“Everyone must work to live, but the purpose of life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others. Only then have we ourselves become true human beings.”

Albert Schweitzer

Life , Help

“The man who dares to live his life with death before his eyes, the man who receives life back bit by bit and lives as though it did not belong to him by right but has been bestowed on him as a gift, the man who has such freedom and peace of mind that he has overcome death in his thoughts — such man believes in eternal life because it is already his, it is a present experience, and he already benefits from its peace and joy. He cannot describe this experience in words. He may not be able to conform his view with the traditional picture of it. But one thing he knows for certain: Something within us does not pass away, something goes on living and working wherever the kingdom of the spirit is present. It is already working and living within us, because in our hearts we have been able to reach life by overcoming death.”

Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for Life (1969)

Life , Death , Peace , Freedom

“The ideal "Life of Jesus" [biography] at the close of the nineteenth century is the "Life" which Heinrich Julius Holtzmann did not write — but which can be pieced together from his commentary on the synoptic gospels and his new testament theology. It is ideal because, for one thing, it is unwritten, and arises only in the idea of the reader by the aid of his own imagination, and, for another, because it is traced only in the most general outline.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 296

Life , Imagination , Idea

“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.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 264

Life , Soul , Failure , Nature

“Those who thank 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, whatever the experience.”

Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for Life (1969)

God , Dependency , Gratitude , Happiness

“Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. … humanity meaning consideration for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics, Chapter 26

Happiness

“We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Most certainly I am! I cannot escape my responsibility by saying the State will do all that is necessary. It is a tragedy that nowadays so many think and feel otherwise.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 309

Feeling , Thinking

“The only way out of today's misery is for people to become worthy of each other's trust.”

Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for Life (1969)

People , Way

“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

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 290

Truth , Faith , Way , Departure

“Indian thought has greatly attracted me since in my youth I first became acquainted with it through reading the works of Arthur Schopenhauer. From the very beginning I was convinced that all thought is really concerned with the great problem of how man can attain to spiritual union with infinite Being. My attention was drawn to Indian thought because it is busied with this problem and because by its nature it is mysticism. What I liked about it also was that Indian ethics are concerned with the behaviour of man to all living beings and not merely with his attitude to his fellow-man and to human society.”

Albert Schweitzer

Preface, p. vi
Indian Thought And Its Development (1936)

Youth , Business , Nature , Problem

“Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That 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.”

Albert Schweitzer

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Life , Evil

“As long as I can remember, I have suffered because of the great misery I saw in the world. I never really knew the artless, youthful joy of living, and I believe that many children feel this way, even when outwardly they seem to be wholly happy and without a single care.”

Albert Schweitzer

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Children , Youth , World , Way

“Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 164

Life , Courage

“It is the fate of 'little faiths' of truth that they, true followers of Peter, whether they be Roman or the Protestant observance, cry out and sink in the sea of ideas, where the followers of Paul, believing in the Spirit, walk secure and undismayed.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 32

Fate , Truth , Faith , Idea

“Every start upon an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to be successful.”

Albert Schweitzer

Ch. 9 : I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor http://books.google.com/books?id=qSihr5VGV4YC&q=%22Every+start+upon+an+untrodden+path+is+a+venture+which+only+in+unusual+circumstances+looks+sensible+and+likely+to+be+successful%22&pg=PA90#v=onepage
Out of My Life and Thought : An Autobiography (1933)

Success

“Whoever has looked into the eyes of Jesus as he appears to us in his words knows that true happiness consists of service to this great One and his Spirit — and a life offerred to his work. Those who accept this mode of life, who know how to live it, become brothers and sisters.”

Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for Life (1969)

Life , Sister , Appearance , Happiness

“Most men are scantily nourished on a modicum of happiness and a number of empty thoughts which life lays on their plates. They are kept in the road of life through stern necessity by elemental duties which they cannot avoid.
Again and again their will-to-live becomes, as it were, intoxicated: spring sunshine, opening flowers, moving clouds, waving fields of grain — all affect it. The manifold will-to-live, which is known to us in the splendid phenomena in which it clothes itself, grasps at their personal wills. They would fain join their shouts to the mighty symphony which is proceeding all around them. The world seem beauteous…but the intoxication passes. Dreadful discords only allow them to hear a confused noise, as before, where they had thought to catch the strains of glorious music. The beauty of nature is obscured by the suffering which they discover in every direction. And now they see again that they are driven about like shipwrecked persons on the waste of ocean, only that the boat is at one moment lifted high on the crest of the waves and a moment later sinks deep into the trough; and that now sunshine and now darkening clouds lie on the surface of the water.
And now they would fain persuade themselves that land lies on the horizon toward which they are driven. Their will-to-live befools their intellect so that it makes efforts to see the world as it would like to see it. It forces this intellect to show them a map which lends support to their hope of land. Once again they essay to reach the shore, until finally their arms sink exhausted for the last time and their eyes rove desperately from wave to wave. …
Thus it is with the will-to-live when it is unreflective.
But is there no way out of this dilemma? Must we either drift aimlessly through lack of reflection or sink in pessimism as the result of reflection? No. We must indeed attempt the limitless ocean, but we may set our sails and steer a determined course.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 256

Life , Men , Lie , World

“Only when an ideal of peace is born in the minds of the peoples will the institutions set up to maintain this peace effectively fulfill the function expected of them.”

Albert Schweitzer

The Problem of Peace (1954)

People , Peace

“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.”

Albert Schweitzer

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Life , Feeling , Thinking

“If rational thought thinks itself out to a conclusion, it arrives at something non-rational which, nevertheless, is a necessity of thought. This is the paradox which dominates our spiritual life. If we try to get on without this non-rational element, there result views of the world and of life which have neither vitality nor value.”

Albert Schweitzer

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Life , World , Thinking

“The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics.”

Albert Schweitzer

Radio appeal for peace, Oslo, Norway (30 March 1958)

War

“I have twice gone fishing with rod and line just because other boys asked me to, but this sport was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook for bait, and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up, and even found courage enough to dissuade other boys from going.”

Albert Schweitzer

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Boy , Courage , Fish , Sport

“From my youth onwards, I have felt sure that all thought which thinks itself out to an issue ends in mysticism. In the stillness of the African jungle I have been able to work out this thought and give it expression.”

Albert Schweitzer

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Youth , Thinking

“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.”

Albert Schweitzer

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Life , Men , Feeling , Help

“The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.”

Albert Schweitzer

Epilogue, p. 235 http://books.google.com/books?id=jHuYuLugqBAC&q=%22The+ethic+of+Reverence+for+Life+is+the+ethic+of+Love+widened+into+universality%22&pg=PA235#v=onepage
Out of My Life and Thought : An Autobiography (1933)

Love , Life , Universe

“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

Epilogue, p. 241
Out of My Life and Thought : An Autobiography (1933)

Spring

“I was convinced — and I am so still — that the fundamental principles of Christianity have to be proved true by reasoning, and by no other method. Reason, I said to myself, is given us that we may bring everything within the range of its action, even the most exalted ideas of religion. And this certainty filled me with joy.”

Albert Schweitzer

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Religion , Idea , Joy

“Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.”

Albert Schweitzer

Letter to a Japanese Animal Welfare Society (1961)

Life , Religion

“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

Reverence for Life (1969)

Love , Life

“Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus; that was, indeed, the only way in which it could make Him live. But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 4

Life , Way , Success

“The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: Out of My Life and Thought : An Autobiography (1933), Ch. 13, p. 188
Context: The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and 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. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that lives — only that ethic can be founded in thought. … The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort.

Life , World , Question , Reality

“Modern Christianity must always reckon with the possibility of having to abandon the historical figure of Jesus. Hence it must not artificially increase his importance by referring all theological knowledge to him and developing a ‘christo-centric’ religion: the Lord may always be a mere element in ‘religion’, but he should never be considered its foundation. (p. 402)”

Albert Schweitzer

The Quest of the Historical Jesus 2nd edition (1913)

Religion , Knowledge

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

Albert Schweitzer

This quote was attributed to Albert Schweitzer by Rachel Carson on p. 17 of her seminal work Silent Spring (1962), and is widely cited on various Internet websites, but an actual source from Schweitzer’s works is elusive.
Disputed

“The good conscience is an invention of the devil.”

Albert Schweitzer

Variant translation: The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil.
Kulturphilosophie (1923)

“We came to a tree which was still bare, and on which the birds were singing out gaily in the morning, without any fear of us. Then stooping over like an Indian on the hunt, my companion placed a pebble in the leather of his sling and stretched it. Obeying his peremptory glance I did the same, with frightful twinges of conscience, vowing firmly that I would shoot when he did. At that very moment the church bells began to sound, mingling with the song of the birds in the sunshine. It was the warning bell that came a half-hour before the main bell. For me it was a voice from heaven. I threw the sling down, scaring the birds away, so that they were safe from my companion's sling, and fled home. And ever afterwards when the bells of Holy Week ring out amidst the leafless trees in the sunshine I remember with moving gratitude how they rang into my heart at that time the commandment: Thou shalt not kill.”

Albert Schweitzer

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Fear , Home , Bird , Tree

“What really matters is that we should all of us realize that we are guilty of inhumanity. The horror of this realization should shake 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.”

Albert Schweitzer

The Problem of Peace (1954)

War , Hope

“Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.”

Albert Schweitzer

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Men , Strong , Time

“When in the spring the withered gray of the pastures gives place to green, this is due to the millions of young shoots which sprout up freshly from the old roots. In like manner the revival of thought which is essential for our time can only come through a transformation of the opinions and ideals of the many brought about by individual and universal reflection about the meaning of life and of the world.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 10

Life , World , Spring , Universe

“This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self-evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even when He was once more recalled to life. He was still, like Lazarus of old, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes — the grave-clothes of the dogma of the Dual Nature.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 3

Life , Men , Imagination , Birth

“A word in conclusion about the relations between the whites and blacks. What must be the general character of the intercourse between them? Am I to treat the black man as my equal or my inferior? I must show him that I can respect the dignity of human personality in every one, and this attitude in me he must be able to see for himself; but the essential thing is that there shall be a real feeling of brotherliness. How far this is to find complete expression in the sayings and doings of daily life must be settled by circumstances. The negro is a child, and with children nothing can be done without the use of authority. We must, therefore, so arrange the circumstances of daily life that my natural authority can find expression. With regard to the negroes, then, I have coined the formula: "I am your brother, it is true, but your elder brother."”

Albert Schweitzer

Ch. VII, Social Problems in the Forest, p. 130 https://archive.org/stream/ontheedgeofthepr007259mbp#page/n163/mode/2up (1924 translation by Ch. Th. Campion); Schweitzer later repudiated such statements, saying "The time for speaking of older and younger brothers has passed.", as quoted in [Forrow, Lachlan, Foreword, Russell, C.E.B., African Notebook, Syracuse University Press, Albert Schweitzer library, 2002, 978-0-8156-0743-4, http://books.google.com/books?id=qa-TVXEkY3sC&pg=PR13, 23 June 2017, xiii]
Variant:
The African is my brother — but he is my younger brother by several centuries.
As quoted in The Observer (23 October 1955)
On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1922)

Life , Children , Feeling , Nature

“The deepest thinking is humble. It is only concerned that the flame of truth which it keeps alive should burn with the strongest and purest heat; it does not trouble about the distance to which its brightness penetrates.”

Albert Schweitzer

Source: Indian Thought And Its Development (1936), Ch. XVI : Looking Backward and Forward, p. 257

Truth , Thinking