Albert Schweitzer Quotes

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

I think of myself as being a relatively intelligent man who is open to a lot of different things and I think that questioning our purpose in life and the meaning of existence is something that we all go through at some point.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

How we come to be, and how we are what we are, is beyond any understanding. I have been obsessed by this, trying to understand the very nature of my existence.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

I think Poe had a mission to tell us what it's all about. To answer some of the great questions of life.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

If you cannot render me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction from some magical theory;

All of my work is sort of fed by a question, a need to understand the world and why the world is what it is.

The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.

I do find that I tend to write about big questions. Why are we here? What are we doing? How do we relate to each other?

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

All of us have life; few of us have an idea of it.

We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life.

If the world is an objective reality that exists independently of us, then humans themselves, even in their own eyes, are nothing more than objects, and their life stories merely a series of disconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder at, but which they themselves have nothing to do with.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.