Albert Schweitzer
161 quotes
Biography
Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was a German polymath from Alsace. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician.
"Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier."
"Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being."
"The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others."
"If you love something so much let it go. If it comes back it was meant to be; if it doesn't it never was"
"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."
"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us."
"Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile."
"He who does not reflect his life back to God in gratitude does not know himself."
"True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: 'I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live"
"It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth."
"Do something wonderful, people may imitate it."
"We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit."
"One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity."
"Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him."
"An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while the pessimist sees only the red spotlight... The truly wise person is colour-blind."
"Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world any more. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf."
"Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life — it is bad to damage and destroy life. And this ethic, profound and universal, has the significance of a religion. It is religion."
"The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics. We have reached the point of regarding each other only as members of a people either allied with us or against us and our approach; prejudice, sympathy, or antipathy are all conditioned on that. Now we must rediscover the fact that we — all together — are human beings, and that we must strive to concede to each other what moral capacity we have. Only in this way can we begin to believe that in other peoples as well as in ourselves there will arise the need for a new spirit which can be the beginning of a feeling of mutual trustworthiness toward each other."
"Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy."
"This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self-evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even when He was once more recalled to life. He was still, like Lazarus of old, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes — the grave-clothes of the dogma of the Dual Nature."
"Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus; that was, indeed, the only way in which it could make Him live. But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus."
"The ideal "Life of Jesus" [biography] at the close of the nineteenth century is the "Life" which Heinrich Julius Holtzmann did not write — but which can be pieced together from his commentary on the synoptic gospels and his new testament theology. It is ideal because, for one thing, it is unwritten, and arises only in the idea of the reader by the aid of his own imagination, and, for another, because it is traced only in the most general outline."
"The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Savior. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to his own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position."
"He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."
"Modern Christianity must always reckon with the possibility of having to abandon the historical figure of Jesus. Hence it must not artificially increase his importance by referring all theological knowledge to him and developing a ‘christo-centric’ religion: the Lord may always be a mere element in ‘religion’, but he should never be considered its foundation. (p. 402)"