Reverence for Life

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The phrase Reverence for Life is a translation of the German phrase: "Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben." These words came to Albert Schweitzer on a boat trip on the Ogooué River in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon), while searching for a universal concept of ethics for our time. In Civilization and Ethics, Schweitzer wrote:

Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.^{[page needed]}

James Brabazon, author of Albert Schweitzer: A Biography, defined Reverence for Life as follows:

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.^{[page needed]}

Schweitzer made Reverence for Life the basic tenet of an ethical philosophy, which he developed and put into practice. He gave expression to its development in numerous books and publications during his life and also in manuscripts which have recently been published; the main work being his unfinished four-part Philosophy of Culture (German: Kulturphilosophie) subtitled: "The World-view of Reverence for Life". He also used his hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon, to demonstrate this philosophy in practice.