Energized Thought

The identification of immediate with past experience, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the present, amounts to a participation between the ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance. Such participation frees the essential reality that is denied to the contemplative as to the active life. What is common to present and past is more essential than either taken separately. Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic. Imagination, applied — a priori — to what is absent, is exercised in vacuo and cannot tolerate the limits of the real. Nor is any direct and purely experimental contact possible between subject and object, because they are automatically separated by the subject's consciousness of perception, and the object loses its purity and becomes a mere intellectual pretext or motive. But, thanks to this reduplication, the experience is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal. But if this mystical experience communicates an extratemporal essence, it follows that the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being. Consequently the Proustian solution consists, in so far as it has been examined, in the negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead because Time is dead. (At this point a brief impertinence, which consists in considering Le Temps Retrouvé almost as inappropriate a discription of the Proustian solution as Crime and Punishment of a masterpiece that contains no allusion to either crime or punishment. Time is not recovered, it is obliterated....)
— Samuel Beckett, Proust, pp. 55-56.

The deepest thinking is humble. It is only concerned that the flame of truth which it keeps alive should burn with the strongest and purest heat; it does not trouble about the distance to which its brightness penetrates.
— Albert Schweitzer, Indian Thought and Its Development, p. 257, in Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, Charles R. Jay (ed.), p. 3.

Every conviction which possesses real value is nonrational and enthusiastic in character, since it cannot be the product of knowledge about the universe, but arises from the reflective experience of the will-to-live, in virtue of which we leave behind all mere intellectual knowledge of the world. This is what rational thought, when continued to its final conclusion grasps and understands as the real truth, in the strength of which we have to live. The way to true mysticism leads us through and beyond rational reflection to profound experience of the world and of our will-to-live. We must all venture once more to become "thinkers," in order to attain to that mysticism which is the only immediate and the only profound world-view. We must all make pilgrimage through the realm of knowledge until we reach the point where it passes into actual experience of the world's essential being. We must all become religious as the result of reflection.
— Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, p. xviii, in Ibid., pp. 10-11.

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.
— Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 401, in Ibid., p. 88.

Christianity cannot definitely choose between pessimism and optimism. It is pessimistic, not only because, like Brahmanism and Buddhism, it realizes that imperfection, pain, and sorrow are essential features of the natural world, but for this additional and still more important reason, that in man it finds a will which does not answer to the will of the ethical God and which, therefore, is evil.
     Again, Christianity is optimistic, because it does not abandon the world, does not, as do Brahmanism and Buddhism, withdraw from it in negation of life and of the world, but assigns to man a place in this world and commands him to live in and to work in it in the spirit of the ethical God. Further, Christianity gives him the assurance that thereby God's purpose for the world and for man is being fulfilled; it cannot, however, explain how. For what significance have the ethical character and the ethical activity of the religious individual in the infinite happenings of the universe? What do they accomplish? We must admit that the only answer we have to this question is that thereby the will of God is fulfilled.
— Albert Schweitzer, Christianity and the Religions of the World, pp. 73-74, in Ibid., pp. 96-97.