This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"You are a distinctive and individual expression of a Creative Force. You are not a blueprint or a carbon copy or a ditto of anyone past, present or future. You are you and there is no one quite like you in the world." - 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." - Marcus Bach, fully James Marcus Bach
"God has given man the eye of investigation by which he may see and recognize truth. He has endowed man with ears that he may hear the message of reality, and conferred upon him the gift of reason by which he may discover things for himself. Man is not intended to see through the eyes of another, hear through another’s ears nor comprehend with another’s brain. Each human creature has individual endowment, power and responsibility in the creative plan of God." - Abdul Baha, or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, born `Abbás Effendí
"The greatest responsibility an individual assumes is to oneself." - Madeline Bartosch
"In all real prayer there are two persons interacting with each other: God and the finite mind. The individual is meeting the conditions for finding God, and God is finding the opportunity to enter into a kind of relationship with the individual otherwise not possible. For in prayer at its best both God and man meet, both to foster the creation of new values in and through each other and to enjoy mutual fellowship for its own sake." - Peter A. Bertocci, fully Peter Anthony Bertocci
"Love rests on the preservation of our species; art is our instinctive instrument for the preservation of the individual, of the unique man, woman and child, and the means of evolution of us all into something able and worthy of survival on the living earth." - Earle Birney, fully Earle Alfred Birney
"All spiritual growth takes place by leaps and bounds, both in the individual and, as here, in the community. The crisis is to be regarded as a nexus of growth." - Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt
"For millennia, shamans and witch doctors... made no distinction between physical, emotional, and spiritual healing. To them, all symptoms were signs of something awry in the individual’s relationship with the larger universe of spirits and animal powers." - Katy Butler
"The enemy is brownness and whiteness, maleness and femaleness. The enemy is our urgent need to stereotype and close off people, places, and events into isolated categories. Hatred, distrust, irresponsibility, unloving, classism, sexism, and racism, in their myriad forms, cloud our vision and isolate us… We close off avenues of communication and vision so that individual and communal trust, responsibility, loving, and knowing are impossible." -
"The great man [is] an outstanding individual who is at once a product and an agent of the historical process, at once the representative and the creator of social forces which change the shape of the world and the thoughts of men." - Edward Hallet "Ted" Carr
"I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long eons of evolution, our genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future – be it one of promise or threat. Yet genetic deterioration through manmade [chemical and radioactive] agents is the menace of our time, “the last and greatest danger to our civilization.”" - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"However complex the background of a so-called meaningful life, the meaning itself is directly experienced. And the ultimate ground or place of meaning arising is the individual human being, in the specific situations of his or her life. While the sources of meaning are almost predictably outside the individual self, the experiences of meaningfulness are necessarily someone’s experiences." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"The meaning of life is to be found in the living of it, and even for the individual a considerable range of possibilities and an unending flow of reflections upon your life constitutes part of that meaning. Play has no ultimate goal, no serious goal that will bring it to an end, but rather renews itself in constant repetition, with no repetition being an exact repeat of a prior instance. Living has a series of goals and is serious as well as playful, and yet the goals are always in transformation, or at least always in doubt. Circumstances are often similar, but it is not easy to specify exactness in your lived experience, even with someone with whom you have lived most of your life." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality." - Joan Chittister, fully Sister Joan D. Chittister
"A person who holds for the moral authority of conscience will also hold for the individual’s freedom to follow his conscience without interference from the State." - Eric D’Arcy, fully Joseph Eric D'Arcy
"The peculiar character of an individual human being is distinction from an atom lies in this, that he is the owner of himself and responsible to himself." - Martin D’Arcy, fully Fr. Martin Cyril D'Arcy
"The great moral reformers have usually found the greatest opposition not in the “immoral” and impulsive individual, but in the regularly constituted organs of social authority and law." - Christopher Henry Dawson
"The highest moral ideal either for a people or for an individual is to be true to its destiny... to leave the known for the unknown." - Christopher Henry Dawson
"The search for final truth rests with each individual personality and rendering the partial interpretations of our experience fundamentally consistent with one another. It is this fact that justifies the use of the word `God’ to designate the all embracing personality in whose existence ultimate reality exists." - L. Francis Edmunds
"What is important and of greatest significance is that an ideal of final truth is always before use and that the search for truth is acknowledged by all men as a duty not imposed from outside but born from within. The search for final truth rests with each individual personality and rendering the partial interpretations of our experience fundamentally consistent with one another. It is this fact that justifies the use of the word `God’ to designate the all embracing personality in whose existence ultimate reality exists." - L. Francis Edmunds
"It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good. Otherwise, he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community." - Albert Einstein
"One can organize to apply a discovery already made, but not to make one. Only a free individual can make a discovery." - Albert Einstein
"The essence of the Jewish concept of life seems to me to be the affirmation of life for all creatures. For the life of the individual has meaning only in the service of enhancing and ennobling the life of every living thing. Life is holy; i.e., it is the highest worth on which all other values depend." - Albert Einstein
"The more cruel the wrong that men commit against an individual or a people, the deeper their hatred and contempt for their victim. Conceit and false pride on the part of a nation prevent the rise of remorse for its crime." - Albert Einstein
"Every new idea will… be troublesome to [the individual’s] entire being. He will defend himself against it because it threatens to destroy his certainties. He thus actually comes to hate everything opposed to what propaganda has made him acquire. Propaganda has created in him a system of opinions and tendencies which may not be subjected to criticism… Incidentally, this refusal to listen to new ideas usually takes on a vigorous propaganda will declare that all new ideas are propaganda." - Jacques Ellul
"The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the massification of society… The individual who is prevented by circumstances from becoming a real person, who can no longer express himself through personal thought or action, who finds his aspirations frustrated, projects onto the hero all he would wish to be. He lives vicariously and experiences the athletic or amorous or military exploits of the god with whom he lives in spiritual symbiosis." - Jacques Ellul
"A grand meta-narrative is a story of the development and purpose of human history in which we as individual can find a place and play a role. Four basic meta-narratives: (1) Platonic Christian is the idea of life as a journey to another unchanging realm. (2) Hegel’s view that history is the unfolding of the consciousness of God. (3) Marx’s notion of another revolution ushering in a new era. (4) Nietzsche’s idea that there is no “beyond” and that the only meaning comes through creative activities through which we shape a life for ourselves." - Stephen A. Erickson
"We need to recognize that both the society and the individual are essential to a morality which we can use in the next century. If we could enter the next century with a wider recognition of the balance - and get away form either collectivistic excesses or the celebration of radical individualism - I think we’d be better for it." - Amitai Etzioni, born Welker Falk
"In your daily life, you can treat people you meet in a way that strengthens them in spirit through genuine interest or respect… not a patronizing or false sense of sincerity… but rather a genuine curiosity and respect for each individual you meet… Your actions do make a lasting impact on each person you encounter. It’s an enormous responsibility to take seriously how you treat the people in your life, and a great joy to know you have acted with caring, warmth, and love." - Leonard Felder
"Every soul develops itself only by means of other souls, and there are no longer individual men, but only one humanity." - Johann Gottlieb Fichte
"Your contact with God lies in recognizing your identity, the “I am.” The “I am” is everything you arrogate to yourself in thought. If you say, “I am sick,” you have ordered your own. If you say, “I am well, I am one with God,” you have ordered your own. God is universal - “I am what I am” - and you as an individual particularize it when you say, “I am.” When you use your “I am” in an inverted or negative sense, you are using it against yourself and will bring sickness, poverty, controversy, and fear into your life. When you particularize, or individualize, Divine Power by using “I am” constructively, then you will get health, prosperity, and abounding happiness, for you will have identified yourself with God - the gold mine within." - Emmet Fox
"All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purposes of the growth and happiness of the individual." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"In our effort to escape from aloneness and powerlessness, we are ready to get rid of our individual self either by submission to new forms of authority or by a compulsive conforming to accepted patterns." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Naturalistic determinism has not yet found a place for the concept of individual responsibility." - Ralph Henry Gabriel
"It is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire to save their honor, their religion, their soul and lay the foundation for that empire's fall or its regeneration." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"The liturgy does not say “I” but “We,”… The liturgy is not celebrated by the individual, but by the body of the faithful." - Romano Guardini
"When it is said and done, life’s journey isn’t about humanity in general, or even the person next door. It’s about you and me. Our individual lives are the focus, a picture framed by our birth and death. Our personal goals and principles are under scrutiny; our personal success or failure is in the balance." - Os Guiness
"Opulence breeds complacency. The more things we have all around us, the less individual meaning any of them has." - Kenneth Hanson, aka Ken Hanson
"For collective action it suffices if the mass can be managed; collective growth is only possible through the freedom and enlargement of individual minds." - B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
"Outside the sphere of individual responsibility there is neither goodness or badness… Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value." - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"The problem is the spirit of our age: denial of transcendence, the vapidity of values, emptiness in the heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Any attempt to replace the personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism." - Herman Hesse
"To see the world as being ruled by a divine love which sets infinite value upon each individual and includes all men in its scope, and yet to live as though the world were a realm of chance in which each must fight for his own interests against the rest, argues a very dim and wavering vision of God’s rule." - John Hick, fully John Harwood Hick
"Man is in process of becoming the perfected being whom God is seeking to create. However, this is not taking place – it is important to add – by a natural and inevitable evolution, but through a hazardous adventure in individual freedom." - John Hick, fully John Harwood Hick
"Life is like a tapestry that we view from the wrong side. We see all the strands and knots, and it makes no sense from the back. But there is a different view of the whole things to which we are assured some day we will be privy. In the meanwhile, there are all these knots we have to deal with existentially; the path has been charted – compassion and justice – imbued by vision. And it’s up to the individual." - Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith