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.
It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don't really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it's better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.
Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.