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
I have listened to many cost of capital discussions, and they have never made much sense. It’s taught in business schools, and consultants use it, so board members nod their heads, without any idea of what’s going on.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
The ability to say "no" is a tremendous advantage for an investor.
To that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant.
Young lawyers attend the courts not because they have business there but because they have no business anywhere else.
Beauty | Cause | Darkness | Desire | Existence | Health | Heart | Life | Life | Little | Love | Melancholy | Nature | Rest | Sorrow | Strength | Will | Woman | World | Friendship | Beauty |
If we believe that this particular pain is the one that will push the baby out of the womb and into our arms, we somehow try to make a place for that pain in our heart. Pain is still there: excruciating, terrible pain. But at the moment of birth, we rarely feel betrayal or rage; we somehow feel that this is simply pain that has come with life.
People | Perception | Rest | Sabbath | Time | Wisdom | Work |
Bless strangers quietly, secretly. Offer it to people you notice on the street, in the market, on the bus. "May you be happy. May you be at peace." Feel the blessing move through your body as you offer it. Notice how you both receive some benefit from the blessing. Gently, almost without effort, each and every blessing becomes a Sabbath.
It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.
Rest |
It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past. The practical educators assume that human society itself is the only significant context, that change is therefore fundamental, constant, and necessary, that the future will be wholly unlike the past, that the past is outmoded, irrelevant, and an encumbrance upon the future -- the present being only a time for dividing past from future, for getting ready. But these definitions, based on division and opposition, are too simple. It is easy, accepting the viewpoint of either side, to find fault with the other. But the wrong is on neither side; it is in their division... Without the balance of historic value, practical education gives us that most absurd of standards: relevance, based upon the suppositional needs of a theoretical future. But liberal education, divorced from practicality, gives something no less absurd: the specialist professor of one or another of the liberal arts, the custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from.
Much of the obscurity of our effort so far against terrorism originates in the now official idea that the enemy is evil and that we are (therefore) good, which is the precise mirror image of the official idea of the terrorists.
The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it.
Beauty | Despair | Fear | Forethought | Grace | Life | Life | Peace | Rest | Sound | Time | Waiting | World | Beauty |
I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Forethought | Grace | Peace | Rest | Time |
We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsible within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
All theological language is necessarily analogical, but it was singularly unfortunate that the Church, in speaking of punishment for sin, should have chosen the analogy of criminal law, for the analogy is incompatible with the Christian belief in God as the creator of Man. Criminal laws are laws, imposed on men, who are already in existence, with or without their consent, and, with the possible exception of capital punishment for murder, there is no logical relation between the nature of a crime and the penalty inflicted for committing it. If God created man, then the laws of man's spiritual nature must, like the laws of his physical nature, be laws -- laws, that is to say, which he is free to defy but no more free to break than he can break the law of gravity by jumping out of the window, or the laws of biochemistry by getting drunk -- and the consequences of defying them must be as inevitable and as intrinsically related to their nature as a broken leg or a hangover. To state spiritual laws in the imperative -- Thou shalt love God with all thy being, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself -- is simply a pedagogical technique, as when a mother says to her small son, Stay away from the window! because the child does not yet know what will happen if he falls out of it.
We are alive within mystery, by miracle. "Life," wrote Erwin Chargaff, "is the continual intervention of the inexplicable." We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. The constructions of language (which is to say the constructions of thought) are formed within experience, not the other way around. Finally we live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory. There is no reason whatever to assume that the languages of science are less limited than other languages.
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
Man: "I have no sympathy for a man who is intoxicated all the time." WC: "A man who's intoxicated all the time doesn't need sympathy."