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
Our second advantage relates to the allocation of the money our businesses earn. After meeting the needs of those businesses, we have very substantial sums left over. Most companies limit themselves to reinvesting funds within the industry in which they have been operating. That often restricts them, however, to a "universe" for capital allocation that is both tiny and quite inferior to what is available in the wider world. Competition for the few opportunities that are available tends to become fierce. The seller has the upper hand, as a girl might if she were the only female at a party attended by many boys. That lopsided situation would be great for the girl, but terrible for the boys.
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 |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
The practice of meditation is represented by the three monkeys, who cover their eyes, ears and mouths so as to avoid the phenomenal world. The practice of non-meditation is ceasing to be the see-er, hearer or speaker while eyes, ears and mouths are fulfilling their function in daily life.
Awakening | Consciousness | Existence | Service |
For this great Chinese patriot to die in the American desert 22 years after he was forced into exile symbolizes the harsh truth about the ruling Communist regime which Mr. Fang [Chinese astrophysicist] often warned the world about. For those of us whose memories have not been erased by the censorship of getting rich gloriously, Fang was a hero. In the years and months leading up to the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, he dared to tell the historical facts – about Mao, the Party, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution – to a new generation.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
"The action of non-action," is the central paradox of Taoism and as a concept is second in importance only to the Tao itself, which incorporates it; Lao Tzu describes the action/non-action of someone who has realized the Tao as wu-wei: Thus, the wise man deals with things through wu-wei and teaches through no-words. The ten thousand things flourish without interruption. They grow by themselves, and no one possesses them.
Democracy | Existence | Freedom | Need | Objectives | World | Happiness |
I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
Existence | Individual | Qualities | Speech |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The stately ship is seen no more, the fragile skiff attains the shore; and while the great and wise decay, and all their trophies pass away, some sudden thought, some careless rhyme, still floats above the wrecks of Time.
Age | Belief | Culture | Existence | Faith | Ideas | Imagination | Legends | Life | Life | Light | Little | Poetry | Religion | System | Time |
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)
Beauty | Evil | Existence | God | Good | Man | Order | People | Search | Time | Wrong | Beauty | God | Child |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Here I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated.
Existence | Faith | Impossibility | Persistence | Reality | World |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I taught French literature, I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not. (The Vane Sisters)
Common Sense | Existence | Light | Mother | Panic | People | Sense | Time | World |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
And private misfortunes make the public good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well.
The observation of the breathing rhythm is suggested as a support to those who cannot arrive at the spontaneous stillness of total mind without some support. But to depend upon the support for a long period is undesirable and unwarranted. One has to discover for oneself whether one is learning self-reliance through the support or not. Simple observation of the breathing rhythm culminates into silence or total awareness within a few weeks. Secondly the hour of silence should enable one to live in awareness throughout the day.
Discovery | Existence | Freedom | Journey | Meaning | Religion | Revolution | Truth | Discovery |
Traditionally, there have been two separate approaches. One approach takes us toward the social, the economic, the political problems, and says, “Look here, unless the economic and political problems are solved, there will be no happiness and no peace, there will be no end to suffering. It is the responsibility of every individual to engage in solving these problems according to some ideology. Turning toward the inner life, the imbalances and impurities of the inner life, that is not so important, that can be taken care of later on, for it is a self-centered, egoistic activity. But the responsibility is toward the society, toward the human race, so keep aside all those problems of meditation and silence, inner sophistication, transformation for inner revolution—keep all that aside. First turn toward this.” And the other approach says, “The political and economic problems cannot be solved unless the individual is transformed totally. Be concerned with your psychological mutation, the inner, radical revolution. The political, the economic, the social problems can wait.”
Beginning | Existence | Future | Global | Past | Relationship | Science | Technology |