This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In many spiritual traditions there is only one important question to answer, and that question is: Who am I? When we begin to answer it, we are filled with images and ideals – the negative images of ourselves that we wish to change and perfect and the positive images of some great spiritual potential – yet the path is not so much about changing ourselves as it is about listening to the fundamentals of our being.
The willingness to harm or hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. Owning them means taking responsibility for them. Taking responsibility means not letting fear completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness of our own clinging and rejecting, and a willingness to grapple with these mind states, however painful the encounter, can free us from this circle of suffering. Without a daily embodiment in practice, lofty ideals tend to succumb to self-interest.
Fear | Harm | Ideals | Means | Mind | Mindfulness | Practice | Responsibility | Self | Self-interest | Suffering | Vision | Understand |
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
If I do not acquire ideals when I'm young, when will I? Not when I'm old.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The most essential requirement for a happy marriage is soul unity - similarity of spiritual ideals and goals, implemented by a practical willingness to attain those goals by study, effort, and self-discipline.
Discipline | Effort | Goals | Happy | Ideals | Marriage | Self | Soul | Study | Unity |
The ideals men die for often become the prejudices their descendants kill for.
A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can. It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of the life and the duty of life.
Courage | Daring | Duty | Endurance | Fear | Ideals | Joy | Life | Life | Man | Misfortune | Usefulness |
Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.
Ideals | Justice | Opportunity |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
All ideals are dangerous, since they denigrate and stigmatize what is actual. They are poisons, which, however, as occasional medicaments, are indispensable.
Ideals |
Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect, and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.
Every breath you draw, every accelerated beat of your heart in the emotional periods of your oratory depend upon highly elaborated physical and chemical reactions and mechanisms which nature has been building up through a million centuries. If one of these mechanisms, which you owe entirely to your animal ancestry, were to be stopped for a single instant, you would fall lifeless on the stage. Not only this, but some of your highest ideals of human fellowship and comradeship were not created in a moment, but represent the work of ages.
Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
Only a few rare souls in a century, to whose class I make no pretension, count much in the great flow of this Republic. The life stream of this nation is the generations of millions of human particles acting under the impulses of advancing ideas and national ideals gathered from a thousand springs... We are but transitory officials in government whose duty is to keep these channels clear and to strengthen and extend these dikes. What counts toward the honor of public officials is that they sustain the national ideals upon which are patterned the design of these channels of progress and the construction of these dikes of safety.
Design | Duty | Government | Honor | Ideals | Ideas | Life | Life | Progress | Public | Government |
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
Are ideals confined to this deformed experiment upon a noble purpose, tainted, as it is, with bargains and tied to a peace treaty which might have been disposed of long ago to the great benefit of the world if it had not been compelled to carry this rider on its back?
Experiment | Ideals | Peace | World |
What is important is what you are, not what the ideal is, not the ideal student or his qualifications. You are important, not an ideal. In understanding yourself, you will find out how false these ideals are. Ideals are the inventions of the mind which runs away from what the thing is.
Ideals | Important | Mind | Understanding | Will |
Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles.
Ideals | Objectives |