This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gilmary Simmons, born Eileen Catherine Simmons
To know our purpose for being here, we have to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know God who created us... Through knowing God’s love, through prayer, we come to find our best self. Each of us has a call. No two of us are alike in our potential for growth and development... Sometimes we find our meaning from our successes. Sometimes suffering is the prelude to understanding, and we realize that eventually, out of darkness, comes light... I chose to try to know God and to find a deeper meaning in life through sharing my life with others, reaching out and being more vulnerable and open to the stranger, the one in need, the depressed and the ill... The specific purpose each one of us discovers along the way, we do have a common purpose. It is to become part of the life of God; to know, love and serve Him; to come to know and love our brothers and sisters; to be energized and made whole by God’s tremendous love for us in this life and the next, a love that binds us all together.
Darkness | God | Growth | Knowing | Life | Life | Light | Love | Meaning | Need | Prayer | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Suffering | Understanding | Wisdom | God |
Marcus Bach, fully James Marcus Bach
You will to believe that because you are an individual expression of God there is purpose, real and meaningful in your life, and you will to believe that to achieve this purpose you are also equipped with the talent and potential necessary for its achievement. Will to believe it!... It is the originality in each of us and not our uniformity which gives life its deepest meaning.
Achievement | God | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Originality | Purpose | Purpose | Uniformity | Will | Talent | God |
Modern mental hospitals, where every method of control has been euphemistically renamed, can be frightening places. The actions of every staff member – the aide who holds a patient down, the nurse who injects the medication, the doctor who prescribes it – all have been defined as benevolent. Patients who dare to utter the unauthorized reality – that they are prisoners and that their “helpers” are jailers – only provide further evidence that they are indeed ill. Succumbing to brainwashing, accepting reality as defined by one’s captors, differs from a psychiatric “cure” only because in the latter case the accepted reality is the prevailing one. Holding a minority position makes a person a potential subject for psychiatric brainwashing.
Transactional leaders approach followers with an eye to exchanging one thing for another: jobs for votes, or subsidies for campaign contributions… The transforming leader looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents.
Looks | Motives | Relationship | Leader | Leadership |
Roland B. Gittelsohn, fully Roland Bertram Gittelsohn
Man was meant to realize the divine potential within him. He misses the mark when he fails to do so. He has attained salvation when he achieves his full spiritual potential as a human being, created in the image of God.
To wed is to bring not only our worldly goods but every potential capacity to create more values in living together… In become one these two create a new world that had never existed before.
Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona
Schools inevitably teach good or bad values in everything they do. Every interaction, whether part of the academic curriculum or the human curriculum of rules, roles, and relationships, has the potential to affect a child’s values and character for good or for ill. The question is not whether to do values education but whether to do it well.
A Reason, or universal self-consciousness, transcends the awareness of oneself in potential conflict with others, because it consists of awareness of oneself and others as existing in the universal infinite Spirit. Reason sees nature as the expression of the infinite Spirit.
Awareness | Consciousness | Nature | Reason | Self | Spirit | Awareness |
The goal itself cannot be the meaning. It might be a potential cause or source of meaning… the cause of happiness is not what happiness consists in.
Reason provides a means of escaping from the constraints of belief-systems backed by authority and from the resentment which clever people feel at the power of their own passions. Because reason--in admittedly varying degrees--is available to everybody, it has a potential advantage over the truth you feel and the truth you are told.
Authority | Belief | Means | People | Power | Reason | Resentment | Truth |