Albert Schweitzer Quotes

My most firmly held value is what Albert Schweitzer termed 'reverence for life.' I take this seriously; many would say that because I extend it to nonhumans, I take it too far.

The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.

Your life is worth much more than gold.

Ethics has not only to do with mankind but with the animal creation as well. This is witnessed in the purpose of St. Francis of Assisi. Thus we shall arrive that ethics is reverence for all life. This is the ethic of love widened universally. It is the ethic of Jesus now recognized as a necessity of thought...Only a universal ethic which embraces every living creature can put us in touch with the universe and the will which is there manifest.

In this life, your so-called ordinary life, you must be rooted; and in your inner space, in the spiritual life, you must be weightless and flying and flowing, floating.

Why separate your spiritual life and your practical life? To an integral being, there is no such distinction.

To inflict cruelties on defenceless creatures, or condone such acts, is to abuse one of the cardinal tenets of a civilized society - reverence for life.

Life is not yours to take.

Prayer is to the spiritual life what the beating of the pulse and the drawing of the breath are to the life of the body.

A Warrior never accepts what is unacceptable.

No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

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.

I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not overanxious about your own comic fallibilities; that gives you tranquility without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself.

The fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life.

Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward people, but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.

We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it

Your reputation is in the hands of others. That's what the reputation is. You can't control that. The only thing you can control is your character.

Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.

Today . . . we know that all living beings who strive to maintain life and who long to be spared pain - all living beings on earth - are our neighbors.

Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, ..., there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben” (“reverence for life”).

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.

Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will.

To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit.

God is not interested in our spiritual life. He's interested in our life.