"As far back as I can remember I was saddened by the amount of misery I saw in the world around me. Youth's unqualified joie de vivre I never really knew.... One thing especially saddened me was that the unfortunate animals had to suffer so much pain and misery.... It was quite incomprehensible to me - this was before I began going to school - why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me good-night, I used to add silently a prayer that I composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: "O heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath, guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace...."
"...this sport [fishing] was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook...and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up.... From experiences like these, which moved my heart...there slowly grew up in me an unshakable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature, and that we ought all of us to feel what a horrible thing it is to cause suffering and death..."
"Standing, as all living beings are, before this dilemma of the will to live, a person is constantly forced to preserve his own life and life in general only at the cost of other life. If he has been touched by the ethic of reverence for life, he injures and destroys life only under a necessity he cannot avoid, and never from thoughtlessness."
- Albert Schweitzer
"Reverence for Life says that the only thing we are really sure of is that we live and want to go on living. This is something that we share with everything else that lives, from elephants to blades of grass - and, of course, every human being. So we are brothers and sisters to all living things, and owe to all of them the same care and respect, that we wish for ourselves."
- James Brabazon (Author of the Biography of Albert Schweitzer)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for caring for animals!