"Reverence for Life"

An interesting quote came my way this morning.
I don't claim to know a thing about Albert Schweitzer. (I did include some info from Wikipedia below the quote.)

But I liked reading these words of his. Editing was done by my friend.

"I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live.

As in my own will to live, there is a longing for a wider life and

pleasure, with dread of annihilation and pain: so is it also in the will to live all around me, whether it can express itself before me or remains dumb.  The will to live is everywhere present, even as in me..........

Ethics consist in my experiencing the  compulsion to show to all wills to live the same reverence as I do my own.  A person is truly ethical when obeying the compulsion to help all life which one is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives............ 

(But it is true that in practice, not all life can be saved)  We are forced to choose....which forms of life, and even which individuals, we shall save and which we shall destroy.

But the principle of reverence for life is nonetheless universal....

(It) compels one to decide for oneself in each case how far one can remain ethical and how far one must submit to the necessity for destruction and injury to life.  No one can decide (for anyone else) at what point, on each occasion, lies the extreme limit of possibility for persistence in the preservation and furtherance of life.  (Each person) has to judge this issue , by letting oneself be guided by a feeling of the highest possible responsibility toward other life.  We must never let ourselves become blunted.  We are living in truth when we experience these conflicts more profoundly."

Albert Schweitzer,  (14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was a German—and later French—theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary in Africa, also known for his interpretive life of Jesus. He was born in the province of Alsace-Lorraine, at that time part of the German Empire, considered himself French and wrote mostly in French.

He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life",^[1] expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, now in Gabon, west central Africa (then French Equatorial Africa). As a music scholar and organist, he studied the music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach.