Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. Extract from 'Memories of childhood and youth.'
Interpretation
Cruelty often arises from a lack of awareness or ingrained behavior rather than a natural inclination to harm others.
In this quote, Albert Schweitzer emphasizes that the cruelty exhibited by individuals is not typically rooted in inherent malignance but rather in a lack of consideration for others or behaviors learned over time. It suggests that by understanding the origins of cruelty, society can work toward reducing it through mindfulness and education, ultimately fostering a more compassionate world.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about compassion in a community service meeting.
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.
I'm going to tell you what my religion is. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Period. Terminato. Finito.
What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.
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