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    The Wisdom of Albert Schweitzer
    The Wisdom of Albert Schweitzer
    The Wisdom of Albert Schweitzer
    Ebook63 pages1 hour

    The Wisdom of Albert Schweitzer

    By Philosophical Library

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    Reverence for Life—Albert Schweitzer’s pivotal philosophy

    Musician, physician, humanitarian, and philosopher, Albert Schweitzer was a twentieth-century Renaissance man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his “Reverence for Life” philosophy. The Wisdom of Albert Schweitzer explores this core philosophy, which inspired one of the world’s great humanitarians.   While traveling in Africa, Schweitzer recognized that all living creatures have a will to live and believed that through a “reverence for life” mankind had an ethical imperative to aid in the welfare of all living things, including the environment. His words have remained an inspiration for generations of humanitarians and environmentalists.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhilosophical Library Open Road
    Release dateSep 7, 2010
    ISBN9781453201312
    The Wisdom of Albert Schweitzer

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      Book preview

      The Wisdom of Albert Schweitzer - Philosophical Library

      THE WISDOM

      OF

      ALBERT SCHWEITZER

      A SELECTION

      Philosophical Library

      AS FAR BACK as I can remember I was saddened by the amount of misery I saw in the world around me. Youth's unqualified joie de vivre, I never really knew, and I believe that to be the case with many children, even though they appear outwardly merry and quite free from care.

      One thing that specially saddened me was that the unfortunate animals had to suffer so much pain and misery. The sight of an old limping horse, tugged forward by one man while another kept beating it with a stick to get it to the knacker's yard at Colmar, haunted me for weeks.

      It was quite incomprehensible to me—this was before I began going to school—why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me good night, I used to add silently a prayer that I had composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace.

      This early influence upon me of the commandment not to kill or to torture other creatures is the great experience of my childhood and youth. By the side of that all others are insignificant.

      We have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature unless there is some unavoidable necessity for it, and that we ought all of us to feel what a horrible thing it is to cause suffering and death out of mere thoughtlessness. And this conviction has influenced me only more and more strongly with time. I have grown more and more certain that at the bottom of our heart we all think this, and that we fail to acknowledge it and to carry our belief into practice chiefly because we are afraid of being laughed at by other people as sentimentalists, though partly also because we allow our best feelings to get blunted.

      None of us can truly assert that he really knows someone else, even if he has lived with him for years. Of that which constitutes our inner life we can impart even to those most intimate with us only fragments; the whole of it we cannot give, nor would they be able to comprehend it. We wander through life together in a semi-darkness in which none of us can distinguish exactly the features of his neighbor; only from time to time, through some experience that we have of our companion, or through some remark that he passes, he stands for a moment close to us, as though illumined by a flash of lightning. Then we see him as he really is.

      To this fact, that we are each a secret to the other, we have to reconcile ourselves.

      The soul, too, has its clothing of which we must not deprive it, and no one has a right to say to another: Because we belong to each other as we do, I have a right to know all your thoughts.

      I could not get rid of the feeling that it was never made clear to us how little we really understand of the processes of Nature.

      It hurt me to think that we never acknowledge the absolutely mysterious character of Nature, but always speak so confidently of explaining her, whereas all that we have really done is to go into fuller and more complicated descriptions, which only make the mysterious more mysterious than ever.

      Love for history and love for science go hand in hand, and I gradually recognized that the historical process too is full of riddles, and that we must abandon forever the hope of really understanding the past.

      The purpose of all philosophy is to make us aware as thinking beings of the intelligent and intimate relationship with the universe in which we have to stand, and of the way in which we must behave in the presence of the stimuli that come from it.

      One kind of philosophy is able to bring man and the universe together only by doing violence to nature and the

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