Helpful Urge

     To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.
      I am pessimistic in that I experience in its full weight what we conceive to be the absence of purpose in the course of world-happenings. Only at quite rare moments have I felt really glad to be alive. I could not but feel with a sympathy full of regret all the pain that I saw around me, not only that of men but that of the whole creation. From this community of suffering I have never tried to withdraw myself. It seemed to me a matter of course that we should all take our share of the burden of pain which lies upon the world. Even while I was a boy at school it was clear to me that no explanation of the evil in the world could ever satisfy me; all explanations, I felt, ended in sophistries, and at bottom had no other object than to make it possible for men to share in the misery around them, with less keen feelings. That a thinker like Liebnitz could reach the miserable conclusion that though this world is, indeed, not good, it is the best that was possible, I have never been able to understand.
     But however much concerned I was at the problem of the misery of the world, I never let myself get lost in broodings over it; I always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of it to an end. Thus I came gradually to rest content in the knowledge that there is only one thing we can understand about the problem, and that is that each one of us has to go his own way, but as one who means to help to bring about deliverance.
— Albert Schweitzer, from Out of My Life and Thought, pp. 279-280, in Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, Charles R. Jay (ed.), pp. 120-121.

No one should compel himself to show to others more of his inner life than he feels it natural to show. We can do no more than let others judge for themselves what we inwardly and really are, and do the same ourselves with them. The one essential thing is that we strive to have light in ourselves. Our strivings will be recognized by others, and when people have light in themselves it will shine out from them. Then we get to know each other as we walk together in the darkness, without needing to pass our hands over each other's faces, or to intrude into each other's hearts.
— Albert Schweitzer, from Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, pp. 93-94, in Ibid., p. 140.

....Thus we no longer rely on bridges formed by ordinary logical thought. Our path leads into the region of naïveté and of paradox. We tread it resolutely and with confidence. We hold to the absolutely and profoundly ethical religion as to the one thing needful, though philosophy may go to rack and ruin. That which appears to be naïveté in Christianity is in reality its profundity.
     There are two kinds of naïveté: one which is not yet aware of all the problems and has not yet knocked at all the doors of knowledge; and another, a higher kind, which is the result of philosophy having looked into all problems, having sought counsel in all the spheres of knowledge, and then having come to see that we cannot explain everything but have to follow convictions whose inherent value appeals to us in an irresistible way.
— Albert Schweitzer, from Christianity and the Religions of the World, pp. 70-71, in Ibid., pp. 210-211.

One realizes that he is but a speck of dust, a plaything of events outside his reach. Nevertheless, he may at the same time discover that he has a certain liberty, as long as he lives. Sometime or another all of us must have found that happy events have not been able to make us happy, nor unhappy events to make us unhappy. There is within each of us a modulation, an inner exaltation, which lifts us above the buffetings with which events assail us. Likewise, it lifts us above dependence upon the gifts of events for our joy. Hence, our dependence upon events is not absolute; it is qualified by our spiritual freedom. Therefore, when we speak of resignation it is not sadness to which we refer, but the triumph of our will-to-live over whatever happens to us. And to become ourselves, to be spiritually alive, we must have passed beyond this point of resignation.
— Albert Schweitzer, from The Ethics of Reverence for Life, p. 229, in Ibid., p. 254.

[Ménalque to the protagonist, Michel:]
....But most of them believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to — they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone — that is what they suffer from — and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia — the most odious cowardice, I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything — but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value — and that is the very thing people try to suppress. they go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.
— André Gide, The Immoralist, pp. 89-90.