I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the intrinsic desire for life and existence amidst universal living aspirations.
Albert Schweitzer's quote emphasizes the profound interconnectedness of life, suggesting that each individual embodies a desire to live and thrive. It highlights the shared experience of living beings, where one's own drive for life resonates with the collective yearning of all life forms, creating a sense of unity and purpose in existence.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students to embrace life fully.
I do not want to frighten you by telling you about the temptations life will bring. Anyone who is healthy in spirit will overcome them. But there is something I want you to realize. It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed, something irreparable happens, the extent of which you won't realize until it will be too late.
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.
By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.
No one can give a definition of the soul. But we know what it feels like. The soul is the sense of something higher than ourselves, something that stirs in us thoughts, hopes, and aspirations which go out to the world of goodness, truth and beauty. The soul is a burning desire to breathe in this world of light and never to lose it--to remain children of light.
The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.
The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.
Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.
LeRoy says there's something you should know, not everybody has a place to go. And home is just a place to hang your head, and dream of things to do in Denver when you're dead.
Whatever thing a man sets his heart on...is his god; and if his god doesn't also happen to be the true and living God of Israel that man is laboring in idolatry.
All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious, and not to admit of any hypothesis whatever, much less of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.
Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.
The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth,-- The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity
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