Inspirational Quotes by Albert Schweitzer

“Life becomes harder for us when we live for others but it also becomes richer and happier.”

“Do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no sunday, it becomes an orphan.”

“Los años arrugan la piel, pero renunciar al entusiasmo arruga el alma.”

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

“The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil”

“The ethics of reverence for life makes no distinction between higher and lower, more precious and less precious lives. It has good reasons for this omission. For what are we doing, when we establish hard and fast gradations in value between living organisms, but judging them in relation to ourselves, by whether they seem to stand closer to us or farther from us. This is a wholly subjective standard. How can we know what importance other living organisms have in themselves and in terms of the universe?”

“As we understand life in ourselves, we want to understand life in the universe. in order to enter into harmony with it.”

“It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security. Anne Morrow Lindbergh”

“ 's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.”

“I look back upon my youth and realize how so many people gave me help, understanding, courage – very important things to me – and they never knew it. They entered into my life and became powers within me. All of us live spiritually by what others have given us, often unwittingly, in the significant hours of our life. At the time these significant hours may not even be perceived. We may not recognize them until years later when we look back, as one remembers some long-ago music or a boyhood landscape. We all owe to others much of the gentleness and wisdom that we have made our own; and we may well ask ourselves what will others owe to us.”

“The fundamental principle of morality which we seek as a necessity for thought is not, however, a matter only of arranging and deepening current views of good and evil, but also of expanding and extending these. A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succour, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.”

“If people would wake that feeling of compassion within themselves, the suffering of others would affect them more often, and the desire to alleviate it, if not prevent it, would grow inside them. Then, the active involvement in the suffering of other beings would become the supreme life principle in everyday reasoning, feeling and the activity of individuals.”

“Това е съдбата на всяка истина - да бъде обект на присмех, когато за пръв път е изказана. Някога се е смятало за смешно да се предположи, че чернокожите са наистина човешки същества и че би трябвало да се третират като такива. Това, което някога е било смешно, сега е неопровержима истина. Днес се смята за преувеличение да се прокламира постоянно уважение към всяка форма на живот като сериозно изискване на рационалната етика. Но идва времето, когато хората ще бъдат удивени, че човешката раса е съществувала толкова дълго преди да осъзнае, че неразумното посягане на живота е несъвместимо с истинския морал. Моралът в своята абсолютна форма обхваща отговорността към всичко живо.”

“Arguing from facts never wins a definitive victory against skillfully presented opinion.”

“...But you must do something more. Seek always to do some good, somewhere”

“Dare to face the situation...Man has become a superman... But the superman with the superhuman power has not risen to the level of superhuman reason. To the degree which his power grows he becomes more and more a poor man... It must shake up our conscience that we become all the more inhuman the more we grow into superhuman.”

“Let us rejoice in the truth, wherever we find its lamp burning.”

“The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve”

“An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while the pessimist sees only the red stoplight. The truly wise person is colorblind.”

“Jesus was called to throw himself on the wheel of world history, so that, even though it crushed him, it might start to turn in the opposite direction. Tom Wright, The Lord and His Prayer (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 69.”