This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
What you really want a course on investing is, how to value a business. That’s what the game is about.
Wise |
A woman is more considerate in affairs of love than a man; because love is more the study and business of her life.
The very difference of character in marriage produces a harmonious combination.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
A man who is seeking for realization is not only going round searching for his spectacles without realizing that they are on his nose all the time, but also were he not actually looking through them he would not be able to see what he is looking for!
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my deep abhorrence if I caught anyone preferring Art To Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart. I lived with crooks but seldom was molested; The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
I had this Melanesian belle, a comely looking lass, and I was headed for the shrubbery, which grows very lush in those parts. Well, her husband was following behind holding a forefinger up in the air and crying, 'One dollah, one dollah!'
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The task of the Christian emperors in combating magic was, in truth, one of the most difficult that can be conceived; and all the penalties that Roman barbarity could devise, were unable to destroy practices which were the natural consequence of the prevailing credulity. As long as men believed that they could easily ascertain the future, it was quite certain that curiosity would at length overpower fear. As long as they believed that a few simple rites could baffle their enemies, and enable them to achieve their most cherished desires, they would most unquestionably continue to practice them. Priests might fulminate their anathemas, and emperors multiply their penalties; but skepticism, and not terrorism, was the one corrective for the evil. This skepticism was nowhere to be found. The populace never questioned for a moment the efficacy of magic.
Wise |
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes each year to disguise the clanking mechanism of machine within machine within machine.
Taste |
Soldier, there is a war between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night. It is for that the poet is always in the sun, patches the moon together in his room to his virgilian cadences, up down, up down. It is a war that never ends.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
It was left by Aristoxenus, who with great ability and labour classified and arranged in it the different modes. In accordance with it, and by giving heed to these theories, one can easily bring a theatre to perfection, from the point of view of the nature of the voice, so as to give pleasure to the audience.
Posterity | Refinement | Wise |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.
Anarchy | Government | Wise | Government |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's control not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a teleplastic mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. (The Vane Sisters)
Little |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.