This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We possess a hidden higher self, the spark of divinity within the soul, which reflects this transcendental reality in our lives. By fulfilling certain necessary conditions, such as making ourselves more loving and compassionate, we can clear away the mental and emotional static that separates us from this inner reality, enabling the higher self to assume a central, guiding role in our lives. This awakening - called enlightenment, deliverance, or salvation in the various traditions - is the goal or purpose of human life. When we achieve this complete transformation of consciousness, we awaken from our limited, often painful condition and reconnect with our true nature.
Awakening | Consciousness | Divinity | Enlightenment | Life | Life | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Salvation | Self | Soul | Wisdom |
Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman
The idea that the media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that’s about tenth or eleventh on their list. The first purpose of the media is to sell us shit, things we don’t need. One moment it’ll be “don’t do drugs” and ten minutes later it’s Miller time.
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
We are not only made in God’s image, but that we are made to image God - to reflect His freedom, joy, compassion and peace in our lives... When religion becomes reduced to an outward observation of rules and ceremonies and an intolerance toward the beliefs of others, we are mistaking the oyster for the pearl. The oyster is certainly valuable, but it is of infinitely greater value when it promotes the growth of the pearl... We cannot reason our way back to the roots of religion. We cannot trap God in stale dogmas or narrow creeds. Our purpose is to make religion a continuous living experience, to lead us toward a resurrection not of the dead but of the living who are dead to their own truth. Then religion becomes a thread that can both link us to the past and guide us to our future.
Compassion | Experience | Freedom | Future | God | Growth | Intolerance | Joy | Observation | Past | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Religion | Truth | Wisdom | God | Value |
Our children should be fitted for bread-winning, but they should be taught that bread-winning is only a means, not the purpose in life, and that the value of life is to be judged... by the good and the service to God with which it is filled.
Children | God | Good | Life | Life | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Service | Wisdom | God | Value |
To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.
The problem of our purpose is a religious problem... Our purpose is derived from faith and is imposed onto reality by our own souls. But faith and religious truth themselves are not absolute. They are relative. Thus the answers one gives to questions about the purpose of life must necessarily be relative to a time, a place, a tradition... To know and worship God means, in Baha’ullah’s words, to promote the unity of the human race and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men”... Someday there will be a global society in which humanity will realize its spiritual and moral potential... The destiny of mankind, actually, is the ultimate creation of the world civilization. It is only in the service of such a cause that I find the meaning and purpose of life.
Absolute | Cause | Civilization | Destiny | Faith | Global | God | Human race | Humanity | Life | Life | Love | Mankind | Meaning | Means | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Reality | Service | Society | Spirit | Time | Tradition | Truth | Unity | Will | Wisdom | Words | World | Worship | Society | God |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense- he is "collective man" - one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.
Aims | Art | Ends | Free will | Man | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Will | Wisdom | Art |
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
As a part of God, that which we are eternally had no beginning nor does it have any end. It is really enough for us to know - that life persists, that it is indeed eternal - and then to get on with the life that we are experiencing in the here and now. We are always greater than what we express, and the purpose of our life is to express more and more of what we eternally are. We do that by living each moment of life as a joyful song of exultation to God... We view each event in our journey as stages of an unfolding spiritual process.
Beginning | Enough | Eternal | God | Journey | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |
Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva
I consider that it is on instruction and education that the future security and direction of the destiny of every nation chiefly and fundamentally rests.
Destiny | Education | Future | Security | Wisdom | Instruction |
We cannot consider the people truly educated if they think of education only as the gathering of facts, data and information. The intelligent person is one who has learned how to choose wisely and therefore has a sense of values, a purpose in life and a sense of direction.
Education | Life | Life | People | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Wisdom | Think |
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at un-extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each even of ordinary life.
Attention | Enlightenment | Life | Life | Meditation | Mindfulness | Nothing | Practice | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |