This is your treasure and your wealth. It will free you of all care. You will be close to nature. You will live with the flowers and the birds, and you will not worry about your clothes or food. You will be one with the birds that find their food, and in harmony with the flowers that are clothed more beautifully than any vain men or women.
- Eberhard Arnold
April 27,2025
- Eberhard Arnold From a letter, May 1920How glad I am that you are so positively united with me in the experience of peace and of Jesus’ spirit of love! The question is not at all one of our only refusing to do military service, though people always put it in this negative way. This refusal, after all, follows as a matter of course from a positive experience of the Spirit of Christ. When this Spirit, which is expressed so very intensely in the Sermon on the Mount and in Romans 8, penetrates us and glows in us, then we will become victorious people who must work as long as it is daylight—work in the productive, creative work of love.
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Jesus tells us not to gather riches on this earth, but to gather the fortune found in love. Let your whole fortune be love, so that wherever you go hearts will open to you. You will be met with hatred because you bring justice, and you will be persecuted and hounded to death for not taking part in injustice. But you will be received with great love in huts which are open for you, and you will be taken in because you bring love.
- Eberhard Arnold
Therefore we take no active part in politics or in the use of violence. We make no concessions, we refuse to get involved; but we are not indifferent. Every politician interests us, whoever he may be. And we wish everyone in politics could hear about us and realize that there is a life of justice and peace, where people have joy in one another. We wish that all policy-makers might be guided by these goals and not stray too far from the way of peace and justice.
- Eberhard Arnold, March 1935