This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Realizing that no simple formulas apply to everyone, we develop the courage to live a unique spiritual life, in our own idiosyncratic way. While archetypal patterns exist to guide seekers, in the West individuals can find their won way within these deeper patterns by honoring their unique backgrounds, temperaments, values and creative capacities... We commit ourselves to passionate action in the world, without becoming overly attached to the success or failure of our endeavors... In spiritual maturity, recognizing that such an attitude of indifference stems from a fear of life, we commit to our spouses, professions, and social action, developing compassion and equanimity through a balanced engagement with life." - Jack Kornfield
"All faces resemble each other, yet how easily we see in each uniqueness, individuality, an identity. How deeply we value these differences... Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"The serene decision of the tombs is beautiful, their uncompromising architecture and the little squares with the coolness of a patio and the isolation and eternal individuation; each contemplated his own death, unique and personal like a memory. The quietude pleases us, we confuse such peace in life with dying and while we believe we desire not to be , we are praying for a peaceful life." - Jorge Luis Borges
"This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's. In the traditional Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there's no way of breaking out from them. When you go to a guru to be guided on a spiritual path, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, just what you must do to get there." - Joseph Campbell
"It is not so much what our parents say that determines our world view as it is the unique world they create for us by their behavior." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"[Mead’s Maxim] Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else." - Margaret Mead
"Remember that you are unique. If that is not fulfilled, then something wonderful has been lost." - Martha Graham
"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost." - Martha Graham
"The perception of one’s fellow man as a whole, as a unity, as a unique – even if his wholeness, unity, and uniqueness are only partly developed, as is usually the case – is opposed in our time by almost everything that is commonly understood as specifically modern. In our time there predominates an analytical, reductive, and deriving look between man and man. This look is analytical, or rather pseudo-analytical, since it treats the whole being as put together and therefore able to be taken apart… An effort is being made today radically to destroy the mystery between man and man. The personal life, the ever-near mystery, once the source of the stillest enthusiasms, is leveled down." - Martin Buber
"Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination of the wonder or beauty of their unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it become so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity." - Norman Cousins
"A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life." - Norman Cousins
"To practice the basic principles of good health, visualize yourself as sound, healthy and filled with vitality and boundless life of your Creator. Look upon yourself as the unique individual that you are. Get in harmony with the creative, life-giving, health-maintaining forces of the universe. Affirm peace, wholeness, and good health - and they will be yours." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"Every great man is a unique." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We have lost touch with our humanity. We have lost touch with our purpose. We have lost sight of the things that matter the most… How many lives will you touch… what legacy will you leave behind… How can I find greater meaning in my life?... My answer always begins the same way: Find your calling. I believe we all have special talents that are just waiting to be engaged in a worthy pursuit. We are all here for some unique purpose, some noble objective that will allow us to manifest our highest human potential, while we, at the same time, add value to the lives around us." - Robin Sharma
"The soul apparently needs amorous sadness. It is a form of consciousness that brings its own unique wisdom." - Thomas Moore
"The soul is more interested in particulars than in generalities. That is true of personal identity as well. Identifying with a group or a syndrome or a diagnosis is giving in to an abstraction. Soul provides a strong sense of individuality - personal destiny, special influences and background, and unique stories. In the face of overwhelming need for both emergency and chronic care, the mental health system labels people schizophrenics, alcoholics, and survivors so that it can bring some order to the chaos of life at home and on the street, but each person has a special story to tell, no matter how many common themes it contains." - Thomas Moore
"We are born alone and we die alone. Thus we can only seek those personal answers alone, for each spiritual path is unique." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares." - Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler
"Respect is not fear and awe; it...is the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear." - Felix Adler
"The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be." - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
"There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it." - Freeman John Dyson
"Given ample time and rather simple circumstances not likely to be unique in the universe, there does seem to be considerable probability , perhaps even inevitability, in the progress from dissociated atoms to macromolecules. The further organization of those molecules into cellular life would seem, on the face of it, to have a far different, very much lower order of probability. It is not impossible, because we know it did happen at least once. " - George Gaylord Simpson
"The human brain is unique in that it is the only container of which it can be said that the more you put into it, the more it will hold." - Glenn Doman
"But there is only one avenue of access to that higher life. It is through a radical purging of inner unreality and the full and final surrender of one's whole self, all that one is and all that one possesses, to the imperious command of the Living God. From that surrender, when complete and unreserved, will follow release from defeat or ennui and the gift of utterly new joy and strength. The old life will be cast away; the old harrowing problems will dissolve; one will stand free from the shackles of temptation, self-consciousness, selfishness; for the first time in one's life, one will know the meaning of spiritual freedom. All that one has heard with the hearing of the ears about the life of religion, all that one has dismissed as the familiar exaggeration of religious propagandists or naïve faith no longer possible for intelligent moderns — all this will come vividly alive within one's own soul. One now knows, with a certainty for which there is no parallel, the truth of religion's claims — the absolutely unique character of the dedicated life, the vivid and continuous awareness of God's presence, the priceless worth of complete fellowship with Him, the service which is perfect freedom." - Henry P. Van Dusen
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible." - Hyman George Rickover
"When the teacher regards each student as a unique individual and therefore not to be compared with any other, he is then not concerned with system or method. His sole concern is with `helping' the student to understand the conditioning influences about him and within himself, so that he can face intelligently without fear, the complex process of living and not add more problems to the already existing mess." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude." - Jacques Ellul
"You have the need and the right to spend part of your life caring for your soul. It is not easy. You have to resist the demands of the work-oriented, often defensive, element in your psyche that measures life only in terms of output -- how much you produce -- not in terms of the quality of your life experiences. To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution." - Jean Shinoda Bolen
"To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution." - Jean Shinoda Bolen
"Ours was the first society openly to define itself in terms of both spirituality and of human liberty. It is that unique self-definition which has given us an exceptional appeal, but it also imposes on us a special obligation, to take on those moral duties which, when assumed, seem invariably to be in our own best interests." - Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.
"Geometry is unique and eternal, a reflection from the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is because man is an image of God." - Johannes Kepler
"Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning." - John Dewey
"Consider who you are working with: Part of the art of leadership is discovering the unique relationship between the needs of the individual and the organization. People only know that you and the organization intend to meet their needs when you tell them so. Determine how to help the person, tell them how you will do it, and follow through – before asking the individual to do things in return for you. People working together ultimately succeed or fail based on their commitment to one another. Never give up easily on one of your people; it does a disservice to that individual and to you." - John C. Maxwell
"Religious observance has more than two dimensions; it is more than an act that happens between man and an idea. The unique feature of religious living is in its being three-dimensional. In a religious act man stands before God." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die." - John Taylor Gatto
"Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. " - Joseph Campbell
"I ask to be made beautiful like the trees are beautiful, each growing according to a unique plan. Lop off a limb and and the tree will accommodate it's loss, still growing and still beautiful. It is my hope to be able to flourish in a similar fashion, taking on the shape and dimensions that is intended for me." - Julia Cameron
"One of the great intellectual mistakes Einstein made is that he thought that space and time are physically or ontologically entangled. In the present non-spatial universal computational program, space and time happen to be entangled to the extent that, under certain unique circumstances, changes in spatial measurements indicate changes in temporal ones. However, a change in the program itself may cause space and time to disentangle." - Kedar Joshi
"The responsibility which rests upon man is proportional to the ability which he possesses and the opportunity which he faces. Perhaps that responsibility is no greater for him than was that of Notharctus or Eohippus or a trilobite, each in his own day, but because of man's unique abilities it is the greatest responsibility that has ever rested upon any of the earth's offspring. " - Kirtley Mather, fully Kirtley Fletcher Mathew
"It requires a conviction that every people has a unique contribution to give to mankind, and that this they must make or remain sterile, subservient, sallow, and that this contribution they must have commenced to make before they can hope to understand the spirit that informs all great works and inspires all noble living." - Lawren Harris, fully Lawren Stewart Harris
"The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt." - Leo Busacaglia
"A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in all the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination for a purpose -- and don't let them tell you otherwise, even if they tell you that purpose is an illusion. (Live an illusion if you have to). You are that combination so that you can do what is essential for you to do. Don't ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredibly unfulfilled tapestry. And only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours." - Leo Busacaglia
"The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it." - Letty Cottin Pogrebin