Albert Schweitzer Quotes

149 Sourced Quotes

Our degeneration, when it is traced back to its origin in our view of the world really consists in the fact that true optimism has vanished unperceived from our midst.

Albert Schweitzer
Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

Albert Schweitzer
World-view is a product of life-view, not vice versa.

Albert Schweitzer
Christianity has had to give up one piece after another of what it still imagined it possessed in the way of explanations of the universe. In this development it grows more and more into an expression of what constitutes its real nature.

Albert Schweitzer
The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.

Albert Schweitzer
The gratitude ascending from man to God is the supreme transaction between heaven and earth.

Albert Schweitzer
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
Awakening of Western thought will not be complete until that thought steps outside itself and comes to an understanding with the search for a world-view as this manifests itself in the
thought of mankind as a whole.

Albert Schweitzer
When we observe contemporary society one thing strikes us. We debate but make no progress. Why? Because as peoples we do not yet trust each other.

Albert Schweitzer
We ought all to make an effort to act on our first thoughts and let our unspoken gratitude find expression. Then there will be more sunshine in the world, and more power to work for what is good.

Albert Schweitzer
Renunciation of thinking is a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.

Albert Schweitzer
For us the great men are not those who solved the problems, but those whodiscovered them.

Albert Schweitzer
But the others, those who tried to bring Jesus to life at the call of love, found it a cruel task to be honest. The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record.

Albert Schweitzer
There is within each of us a modulation, an inner exaltation, which lifts us above the buffetings with which events assail us. Likewise, it lifts us above dependence upon the gifts of events for our joy.

Albert Schweitzer
What the activity of this disposition of ours means in the evolution of the world, we do not know. Nor can we regulate this activity from outside; we must leave entirely to each individual
its shaping and its extension. From every point of view, then, world- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational, and we must have the courage to admit it.

Albert Schweitzer
"A shark! A shark!" I rushed out of the writing room and was shown a black triangle sticking out of the water some fifty meters from the ship, and moving in our direction. It was the fin of the dread monster.

Albert Schweitzer
There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.

Albert Schweitzer
Who can describe the injustice and the cruelties that in the course of centuries the peoples of color of the world have suffered at the hands of Europeans?... We and our civilization are burdened, really, with a great debt. We are not free to confer benefits on these men, or not, as we please; it is our duty. Anything we give them is not benevolence but atonement.

Albert Schweitzer
Nature compels us to recognize the fact of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the other lives who are linked to it. In the very fibers of our being, we bear within ourselves the fact of the solidarity of life.

Albert Schweitzer
The city of truth cannot be built on the swampy ground of skepticism.

Albert Schweitzer
I still remain convinced that truth, love, peaceableness, meekness, and kindness are the violence which can master all other violence. The world will be theirs as soon as ever a sufficient number of people with purity of heart, with strength, and with perseverance think and live out the thoughts of love and truth, of meekness and peaceableness.

Albert Schweitzer
Search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity.

Albert Schweitzer
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.

Albert Schweitzer
I do not believe that we can put into anyone ideas which are not in him already. As a rule there are 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 outside, i.e., from some other person.

Albert Schweitzer
If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.

Albert Schweitzer
There can be no Kingdom of God in the world without the Kingdom of God in our hearts.

Albert Schweitzer
In modern European thought a tragedy is occurring in that the original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude towards the world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process, loosening and finally parting. Out of my life and Thought.

Albert Schweitzer
Do not lose heart, even if you must wait a bit before finding the right thing. Be prepared for disappointment also, but do not abandon the quest.

Albert Schweitzer
A thinking man feels compelled to approach all life with the same reverence he has for his own.

Albert Schweitzer
I believe that I possess this value: to serve Jesus. I am less at peace than if my goal would be to attain a professorship and a good life, but I live. And that gives me the tremendous feeling of happiness, as if one would hear music. One feels uprooted, because one asks, what lies ahead, what decisions should I make-but more alive, happier than those anchored in life. To drift with released anchor.

Albert Schweitzer