Out of My Life and Thought Quotes

“By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.

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.

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

- Albert Schweitzer”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“But merely accepting authoritarian truth, even if that truth has some virtue, does not bring skepticism to an end. To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon retards the advance of reason. Our world rots in deceit. . . . Just as a tree bears the same fruit year after year and at the same time fruit that is new each year, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually created anew in thought. But our age pretends to make a sterile tree bear fruit by tying fruits of truth onto its branches.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“Arguing from facts never wins a definitive victory against skillfully presented opinion.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography

“Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll any stones out of his way, and must calmly accept his lot even if they roll a few more into it.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography

“By itself the affirmation of life can only produce a partial and imperfect civilization. Only if it turns inward and becomes ethical can the will to progress attain the ability to distinguish the valuable from the worthless. We must therefore strive for a civilization that is not based on the accretion of science and power alone, but which cares most of all for the spiritual and ethical development of the individual and of humankind. How”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography

“Bach is played altogether too fast. Music that presupposes a visual comprehension of lines of sound advancing side by side becomes chaos for the listener; high speed makes comprehension impossible. Yet”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography

“Judging by what I have learned about men and women, I am convinced that far more idealistic aspiration exists than is ever evident. Just as the rivers we see are much less numerous than the underground streams, so the idealism that is visible is minor compared to what men and women carry in their hearts, unreleased or scarcely released. Mankind is waiting and longing for those who can accomplish the task of untying what is knotted and bringing the underground waters to the surface.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“Because of the continuity of its tone, which can be maintained as long as desired, the organ has in it an element of the eternal. Even in a secular room it cannot become a secular instrument.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“As a contrast to the Bach of pure music I present the Bach who is a poet and painter in sound. In his music and in his texts he expresses the emotional as well as the descriptive with great vitality and clarity. Before all else he aims at rendering the pictorial in lines of sound. He is even more tone painter than tone poet. His art is nearer to that of Berlioz than to that of Wagner. If the text speaks of drifting mists, of boisterous winds, of roaring rivers, of waves that ebb and flow, of leaves falling from the tree, of bells that toll for the dying, of the confident faith that walks with firm steps or the weak faith that falters, of the proud who will be debased and the humble who will be exalted, of Satan rising in rebellion, of angels on the clouds of heaven, then one sees and hears all this in his music. Bach has, in fact, his own language of sound. There are in his music constantly recurring rhythmical motives expressing peaceful bliss, lively joy, intense pain, or sorrow sublimely borne. The impulse to express poetic and pictorial concepts is the essence of music. It addresses itself to the listener's creative imagination and seeks to kindle in him the feelings and visions with which the music was composed. But this it can do only if the person who uses the language of sound possesses the mysterious faculty of rendering thoughts with a superior clarity and precision. In this respect Bach is the greatest of the great.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“It will always remain incomprehensible that our generation, which has shown itself so great by its discoveries and inventions, could fall so low in the realms of thought.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“Die Welt ist nicht nur Geschehen, sondern auch Leben.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“Der unnatürliche Zustand, daß der Mensch nicht an eine von ihm selber erkannte Wahrheit glaubt, dauert an und wirkt sich aus. Die Stadt der Wahrheit kann nicht auf dem Sumpfboden des Skeptizismus erbaut werden.”
― Albert Schweitzer, My Life and Thought: An Autobiography

“It is not difficult to pretend that Jesus never lived. The attempt to prove it, however, invariably produces the opposite conclusion. In the Jewish literature of the first century the existence of Jesus is not attested to with any certainty, and in the Greek and Latin literature of the same period there is no evidence for it at all. Of the two passages in his Antiquities in which the Jewish writer Josephus makes incidental mention of Jesus, one was undoubtedly interpolated by Christian copyists. The first pagan witness to His existence is Tacitus, who, during the reign of Trajan in the second decade of the second century A.D., reports in his Annals (XV.44) that the founder of the “Christian” sect (which Nero accused of causing the great fire at Rome) was executed under the government of Tiberius by the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate. Since”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography

“Jesus had led me to research on primitive Christianity. The problem of the Last Supper belongs, of course, to both of these subjects. It”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography