Albert Schweitzer Quotes

149 Sourced Quotes

No man need fear death, he need fear only that he may die without having known his greatest power: the power of his free will to give his life for others

Albert Schweitzer
The result of the voyage does not depend on the speed of the ship, but on whether or not it keeps a true course.

Albert Schweitzer
Jesus no doubt fits his teaching into the late-Jewish messianic dogma. But he does not think dogmatically. He formulates no doctrine. He is far from judging any man's belief by reference to any standard of dogmatic correctness. Nowhere does he demand of his hearers that they shall sacrifice thinking to believing.

Albert Schweitzer
Every evening the glimmer of the sea, as the ship ploughs her way through it, is wonderful: the foam is phosphorescent, and little jelly-fishes spring up through it like glowing balls of metal.

Albert Schweitzer
Just as white light consists of colored rays, so reverence for life contains all the components of ethics: love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness and power to forgive.

Albert Schweitzer
Ideals are thoughts. So long as they exist merely as thoughts, the power in them remains ineffective.

Albert Schweitzer
A heavy guilt rests upon us for what the whites of all nations have done to the colored peoples. When we do good to them, it is not benevolence--it is atonement.

Albert Schweitzer
Our age is bent on trying to make the barren tree of skepticism fruitful by tying the fruits of truth on its branches.

Albert Schweitzer
It is only through love that we can attain to communion with God. All living knowledge of God rests upon this foundation: that we experience him in our lives as Will-to-love.

Albert Schweitzer
Each act of unfaithfulness toward our inner being is a blot on our souls. If we continue to be unfaithful, our souls are eventually torn apart and we slowly bleed to death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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