By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.
Interpretation
Treating all beings ethically connects us to the universe spiritually.
Albert Schweitzer emphasizes the importance of ethical behavior towards all living creatures, suggesting that such conduct enriches our spiritual connections with the universe. This relationship fosters a sense of interconnectedness and responsibility for the well-being of all beings, leading to a deeper understanding of life and our place within it.
In practice
In a speech about environmental responsibility, one could use this quote to highlight the connection between ethical treatment of animals and our spiritual well-being.
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.
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.
Day by day we should weigh what we have granted to the spirit of the world against what we have denied to the spirit of Jesus, in thought and especially in deed.
An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.
You ought not attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you attempt to cure the body without the soul.
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.