Quote collection
347 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We cannot understand what happens in the universe. What is glorious in it is united with what is full of horror. What is full of meaning is united to what is senseless. The spirit of the universe is at once creative and destructive — it creates while it destroys and destroys while it creates, and therefore it remains to us a riddle. And we must inevitably resign ourselves to this."
"Ideals are thoughts. So long as they exist merely as thoughts, the power in them remains ineffective."
"When we observe contemporary society one thing strikes us. We debate but make no progress. Why? Because as peoples we do not yet trust each other."
"Soldiers' graves are the greatest preachers of peace."
"Love ... is a living reality."
"What does Reverence for Life say abut the relations between [humanity] and the animal world? Whenever I injury any kind of life I must be quite certain that it is necessary. I must never go beyond the unavoidable, not even in apparently insignificant things. The farmer who has mowed down a thousand flowers in his meadow in order to feed his cows must be careful on his way home not to strike the head off a single flower by the side of the road in idle amusement, for he thereby infringes on the law of life without being under the pressure of necessity."
"It is not enough to merely exist. It's not enough to say, 'I'm earning enough to live and support my family. I do my work well. I'm a good parent.' That's all very well. But you must do something more."
"Help me to fling my life like a flaming firebrand into the gathering darkness of the world."
"Creative energy is the essence of all healing...We physicians do nothing, we only help and encourage the physician within."
"Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, ..., there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben” (“reverence for life”)."
"A thinking man feels compelled to approach all life with the same reverence he has for his own."
"Today . . . we know that all living beings who strive to maintain life and who long to be spared pain - all living beings on earth - are our neighbors."
"Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from him and flows through our being also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity."
"If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness."
"In the past we have tried to make a distinction between animals which we acknowledge have some value and other which, having none, can be liquidated when we wish. This standard must be abandoned. Everything that lives has value simply as a living thing, as one of the manifestations of the mystery that is life."
"I see in him (Dr. Max Gerson) one of the most eminent medical geniuses in the history of medicine...he was greatly impeded by adverse political conditions."
"The friend of nature is the man who feels himself inwardly united with everything that lives in nature, who shares in the fate of all creatures, helps them when he can in their pain and need, and as far as possible avoids injuring or taking life."
"Grow into your ideals so that life cannot rob you of them."
"Love . . . includes fellowship in suffering, in joy and in effort."
"I have given up the ambition to be a great scholar. I want to be more- simply a human. . . . We are not true humans, but beings who live by a civilization inherited from the past, that keeps us hostage, that confines us. No freedom of movement. Nothing. Everything in us is killed by our calculations for our future, by our social position and cast. You see, I am not happy-yet I am happy. I suffer, but that is part of life. I live, I don't care about my existence, and that is the beginning of wisdom."