Albert Schweitzer

Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust and hostility to evaporate.

Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.

The greatest challenge in art is in dealing with disappointment.

The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable, and that we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.

To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

that the humanitarian work to be done in the world should, for its accomplishment, call us as men, not as members of any particular nation or religious body.

Only when an ideal of peace is born in the minds of the peoples will the institutions set up to maintain this peace effectively fulfill the function expected of them.

The audience was transported, not only by the work but also by the fine dynamics of the choir, which were something unusual in those days. Not less powerful was the religious impression made by Bach’s music. “The crowded hall looked like a church,” writes Fanny Mendelssohn. “Every one was filled with the most solemn devotion; one heard only an occasional involuntary ejaculation that sprang from deep emotion.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing you will be successful.

Example is not the main thing. It is the only thing. That is, if the one giving the example is not saying to himself, 'Behold I am giving an example.' That spoils it. Anyone thinking of the example he will give to others has lost his simplicity. Only as a man has simplicity can his example influence others.

There are two great fundamental problems common to all thought: (i) the problem of world- and life-affirmation and world- and life-negation, and (2) the problem of ethics and the relations between ethics and these two forms of man's spiritual attitude to Being.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Die Ethik ist nur vollständig und echt und lebendig, wenn sie alle lebenden Wesen mit einschliesst.

The fact that the work today has become common property may console us for the other fact that an analysis of it is almost as impossible as it is to depict a wood by enumerating the trees and describing their appearance. We can only repeat again and again — take them and play them and penetrate into this world for yourself. Aesthetic elucidation of any kind must necessarily be superficial here, What so fascinates us in the work is not the form or the build of the piece, but the world-view that is mirrored in it. It is not so much that we enjoy the Well-tempered Clavichord as that we are edified by it. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter — to all these it gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.