“In modern European thought a tragedy is occurring in that the original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude towards the world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process, loosening and finally parting. Out of my life and Thought.”
“Reverence for life, veneratio vitæ, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live.”
“Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.”
“Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.”
“I am life which wants to live admidst of lives that want to live.”
“The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach.”
“As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.”
“Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life. It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics and be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds. But on the other hand, those who believe in love for all creation must realize clearly the difficulties involved in the problem of a boundless ethic and must be resolved not to veil from humankind the conflicts which this ethic will involve us, but allow us really to experience them. To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation this is the difficult task which confronts our age.”
“Awakening of Western thought will not be complete until that thought steps outside itself and comes to an understanding with the search for a world-view as this manifests itself in the thought of mankind as a whole.”
“World-view is a product of life-view, not vice versa.”
