Inspirational Quotes by Albert Schweitzer
“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.”
“As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.”
topics: knowledge
“Man has the lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end up destroying the earth.”
“The Full Measure of a man is not to be found in the man himself, but in the colors and textures that come alive in others because of him.”
“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.”
“You must give time to your fellow men -- even if it's a little thing, do something for others -- something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it. --”
“Die Liebe stirbt meistens and den kleinen Fehlern, die man am Anfang so entzückend findet.”
“Every patient carries her or his own doctor inside.”
topics: physical-therapists-alaska
“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.”
topics: philosophy
“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.”
topics: animal-rights , animals , customs , empathy , ethics , human-rights , intentions , optimism , philosophical , thoughtfulness , tradition
“To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.”
“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 are gripped by God’s will of love, and must help carry out that will in this world, in small things as in great things, in saving as in pardoning. To be glad instruments of God’s love in this imperfect world is the service to which we are called.”
“The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.”
“Das Glück ist das einzige, das sich verdoppelt, wenn man es teilt.”
“Whatever you have received more than others in health, in talents, in ability, in success, in a pleasant childhood, in harmonious conditions of home life, all this you must not take to yourself as a matter of course. You must pay a price for it. You must render in return an unusually great sacrifice of your life for other life.”
“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.”
“I do not believe that we can put into anyone ideas which are not in him already. As a rule there is in everyone all sorts of good ideas, ready like tinder. But much of this tinder catches fire, or catches it successfully, only when it meets some flame or spark from the outside, from some other person. Often, too, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by some experience we go through with a fellow man. Thus we have each of us cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. If we had before us those who have thus been a blessing to us, and could tell them how it came about, they would be amazed to learn what passed over from their life to ours.”
“As we know life in ourselves we want to understand life in the universe in order to enter into harmony with it.”
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Albert Schweitzer was born into an Alsatian family which for generations had been devoted to religion, music, and education. His father and maternal grandfather were ministers; both of his grandfathers were talented organists; many of his relatives were persons of scholarly attainments.
Having decided to go to Africa as a medical missionary rather than as a pastor, Schweitzer in 1905 began the study of medicine at the University of Strasbourg. In 1913, having obtained his M.D. degree, he founded his hospital at Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa, but in 1917 he and his wife were sent to a French internment camp as prisoners of war. Released in 1918, Schweitzer spent the next six years in Europe, preaching in his old church, giving lectures and concerts.