Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert Schweitzer

Schweitzer is making a bid for moral clarity in an age that loved cleverness. The line starts with a paradox that’s meant to discipline the intellect: “Everything deep is also simple.” Not “easy,” not “reductive” - simple in the sense that a serious truth can survive translation into plain speech. If an idea can’t be “reproduced simply,” he implies, it may be more dependent on verbal fog than on insight.

The hinge is his condition: simplicity is valid only “as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained.” That phrase is a quiet warning against the kind of simplification that becomes propaganda. Schweitzer isn’t endorsing slogans; he’s arguing for compressing complexity without severing it from the larger moral and factual ecosystem. Depth, for him, is not a private possession of experts. It’s something that should travel - from pulpit to clinic to public life - without losing its ethical bearings.

Then he delivers the real jab: “what matters is not what is witty but what is true.” As a theologian and public intellectual, Schweitzer is pushing back on the social rewards of sparkle. Wit wins rooms; truth changes obligations. The subtext is a critique of performance-driven discourse, where intelligence becomes a style and argument becomes sport. In the early 20th century, with modernity, war, and ideologies competing to narrate reality, Schweitzer stakes out a standard that’s unfashionable and demanding: eloquence is acceptable only as a servant to truth, not as a substitute for it.