The following text is from an article attributed to Albert Schweitzer. According to the Editor's Note, it was written by Albert Schweitzer with the assistance of religion writer Roland Gammon during the week before Schweitzer's death in September, 1965. There are also six pictures of Schweitzer printed in the September 7 edition, including the photograph shown on the first page of this web site.
Emphasis is in the original.
It was the dry season in usually wet equatorial Africa and slowly we crept upstream, laboriously feeling for the channels between the sandbanks of the Ogoone River. Lost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of th ethical which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet I covered with disconnected sentences, merely to keep myself concentrated on the problem. Thus, to me, ethics is nothing else than reverence for life. Without understanding the meaning of the world, I act from an inner necessity of my being so as to create values and to live ethically.