This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walter Anderson, fully Walter Truett Anderson
I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life.
Character | Inevitable | Life | Life | Pain |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
Now it is part of the ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instant, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps—some brief and wholly concrete moment—into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously colored world of the old citizens of Venice—exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fullness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life.
Day |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
The basic ideas of investing are to look at stocks as business, use the market's fluctuations to your advantage, and seek a margin of safety. That's what Ben Graham taught us. A hundred years from now they will still be the cornerstones of investing.
What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist who is a recorder and interpreter of the facts and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts.
Honesty |
W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
In the beginning we had to teach the workers the ABC, both in the literal and in the figurative senses. Now the standard of political literacy has risen so gigantically that we can and should concentrate all our efforts on the more direct Social-Democratic objectives aimed at giving an organized direction to the revolutionary stream.
Government | Nature | War | Government |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.
Experience | Faith | Grave | Little | Will | Think | Understand |
Like no one else,' I told him in a letter written at the end of July, 'you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places....The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon or wind on the moorlands or rich music...or books that have meant more to me than I can explain, or the smell of the earth after a shower or the calmness of the sky at sunset...This is grand, but still it isn't enough for this world, whatever it may be like when we're beyond the sun. The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realize you as tangible.
Change |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
The last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Ability |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being that invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz, however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.
Death | Enjoyment | Existence | Fate | Fulfillment | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Opportunity | Purpose | Purpose | Suffering | Fate |