This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
We were together. All the rest of the world, I forgot.
If school success were a reliable index of human capacity, we should be able to go a step further and say that the intelligence test is a general measure of human capacity. But of course no such claim can be made for school success, for that would be to say that the purpose of the schools is to measure capacity. It is impossible to admit this. The child’s success with school work cannot be a measure of a child’s success in life. On the contrary, his success in life must be a significant measure of the school’s success in developing the capacities of the child. If a child fails in school and then fails in life, the school cannot sit back and say: you see how accurately I predicted this. Unless we are to admit that education is essentially impotent, we have to throw back the child’s failure at the school, and describe it as a failure not by the child but by the school.
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Belief | Conduct | Doubt | Good | Law | Man | Power | Rebellion | Rights |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear'd, my comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop'd well his form, folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully overhead and arefully under feet, and there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited, ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim, vigil for boy of responding kisses, ( never again on earth responding,) vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten'd, I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket, and buried him where he fell.
Law |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
How shall we pass most swiftly; from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To maintain this ecstasy is success in life.
Law |
Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.
Daring | Experience | Forgiveness | God | Law | Men | Religion | Forgiveness | God | Old |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn’t work is when you start doing things that you don't understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up.
Behavior | Business | Change | Compensation | Law | Will | Work | Business |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
I do know that when I am 60, I should be attempting to achieve different personal goals than those which had priority at age 20.
Law |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
The purest doctrines, such as those of Ramana Maharshi, Padma Sambhava, Huang Po and Shen Hui, just teach that it is sufficient by analysis to comprehend that there is no entity which could have effective volition, that an apparent act of volition when in accord with the inevitable can only be a vain gesture and, when in discord, the fluttering of a caged bird against the bars of his cage. When he knows that, then at last he has peace and is glad.
In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The uncritical relations of the dead…
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.