We must never allow the voice of humanity within us to be silenced. It is humanity's sympathy with all creatures that first makes us truly human.
Interpretation
We should always listen to our compassion and empathy for others, as it defines our humanity.
In this quote, Albert Schweitzer emphasizes the importance of nurturing our inner compassion and empathy for all living beings. He argues that ignoring this voice diminishes our humanity and that it is through our sympathy towards others that we truly define what it means to be human.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about animal rights to emphasize the need for compassion.
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.
Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.
I don't smoke but I keep a match box in my pocket, when my heart slips towards sin, I burn the matchstick and heat my palm with it, then say to myself, "Ali you can't even bear this heat, how would you bear the unbearable heat of hellfire?"
Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.
Awareness isnβt something we own; awareness isnβt something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.
Awareness is ever there. It need not be realized. Open the shutter of the mind, and it will be flooded with light.
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