Albert Schweitzer Quotes

“Within every patient there resides a doctor, and we as physicians are at our best when we we put our patients in touch with the doctor inside themselves.”

“If you truly desire happiness, seek and learn how to serve.”

“The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.”

“Seek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth. You must give some time to your fellow man. For remember, you don't live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.”

“Every patient carries her or his own doctor inside.”

“It is a man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.”

“It's supposed to be a secret, but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help. And encourage the doctor within.”

“To the truly ethical man, all of life is sacred, including forms of life that from the human point of view may seem lower than ours.”

“It is through the idealism of youth that man catches sight of truth, and in that idealism he possesses a wealth which he must never exchange for anything else.”

“Creative energy is the essence of all healing...We physicians do nothing, we only help and encourage the physician within.”

“The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything.”

“Reverence for life . . . does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful . . . the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many. . . . It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.”

“Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him.”

“In the past we have tried to make a distinction between animals which we acknowledge have some value and other which, having none, can be liquidated when we wish. This standard must be abandoned. Everything that lives has value simply as a living thing, as one of the manifestations of the mystery that is life.”

“There slowly grew up in me an unshakable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature, unless there is some unavoidable necessity for it.”

“I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.”

“It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed.”

“The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.”

“Kindness works simply and perseveringly; it produces no strained relations which prejudice its working; strained relations which already exist it relaxes. Mistrust and misunderstanding it puts to flight, and it strengthens itself by calling forth answering kindness. Hence it is the furthest reaching and the most effective of all forces.”

“Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force.”

“The spirit of the age is filled with the disdain for thinking.”

“You don't live in a world all alone. Your brothers are here too.”

“All the kindness which a man puts out into the world works on the heart and thoughts of mankind.”

“We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.”

“Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe.”