This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In summary, goals or end-states are not intrinsically valuable, even though they direct and explain action. Although having aims or goals is an important and unavoidable aspect of life, it is a mistake to confuse those goals with non-instrumental value because this would imply that activities are merely instrumentally valuable. It is the goals of our activities that are instrumentally valuable; they are valuable to achieve because they lead to further worthwhile activities.
Action | Aims | Goals | Important | Life | Life | Mistake | Value |
We are not merely instruments, either for our own goals or for those of God. This is why it is a mistake to identify the meaning of life with a goal…. This does not imply that our own goals are not and should not be important to our lives… just that they are not the meaning of life in themselves.
One of the mistakes many of us make is that we feel sorry for ourselves, or for others, thinking that life should be fair, or that someday it will be. It's not and it won't. When we make this mistake we tend to spend a lot of time wallowing and/or complaining about what's wrong with life. 'It's not fair,' we complain, not realizing that, perhaps, it was never intended to be.
Man's biggest mistake is to believe that he's working for someone else.
P. D. Premasiri, fully Pahalawattage Don Premasiri
Fanaticism and intolerance often result from the delusion that, "this alone is the truth and everything else is false," causing people to commit atrocities in the name of "truth."
Delusion | Fanaticism | Intolerance | People | Truth |
Robert Kiyosaki, fully Robert Toru Kiyosaki
In school, you are given the lesson first. On the street, you're given the mistake first and then it's up to you to find the lesson, if you ever find it.
Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something.
Where love, trust, mutual aid, equality, and empathy are not linked, the boot, whip, warring, modern inquisitors, and their epigones will supply a rhetoric that accepts humanity's fate as tragic while doing everything to perpetuate that tragedy.
Aid | Empathy | Equality | Fate | Humanity | Love | Rhetoric | Tragedy | Trust | Will | Fate |