This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We must not indulge in unfavorable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
Intrinsic value can be defined simply: It is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life. The calculation of intrinsic value, though, is not so simple. As our definition suggests, intrinsic value is an estimate rather than a precise figure, and it is additionally an estimate that must be changed if interest rates move or forecasts of future cash flows are revised.
Confidence | Will | Worth |
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
The Taoist talk about vacuity is motivated by a desire for nourishing everlasting life, and the Buddhist talk about non-being is motivated by the desire to escape from the sorrowful sea of life and death. In both cases, a certain selfish idea has been added to the original substance [of the mind], thereby losing the true character of vacuity and obstructing the original substance [of the mind]. The Confucian sage merely returns to the true condition of innate knowledge of the good and does not attach to it any selfish desire.
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
Buddhism claims to be free from attachment to and affliction by phenomenal things [dharma-characters], but actually the opposite is the case. The Buddhists are afraid of the burden in the relationship between father and son and therefore escape from it... In all cases, because the relationships between ruler and minister, father and son, and husband and wife involve attachment to phenomena, they have to escape from them. With us Confucians we accept the relationship between father and son and fulfill it with humanity as it deserves.
A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which the food comes.
Contradiction | Good | Harmony | Justification | Nothing | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |
Those not ruled by the rudder will be ruled by the rocks.
The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars... I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.
Bible | Body | Fear | Grief | Harmony | Sense | Soul | Spirit | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Work | World | Bible | Thought |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: Whom do you write for? The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
Virtue | Virtue | Friendship | Friends | Vice |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
I believe in pride of race and lineage and self - in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
Accomplishment | Honesty | Integrity | Virtue | Virtue |
William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim
Personal leadership exists only as the officers demonstrate it by superior courage, wider knowledge, quicker initiative, and a greater readiness to accept responsibility than those they lead.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The topics and treatment of the mathematics syllabus should be determined by the following principles: a. The course must be enjoyable and generate steadily increasing enthusiasm in the pupils, b. It should develop independence and activity of mind, curiosity, observation, and confidence, c. It should make pupils familiar with the basic ideas and processes of mathematics.
Children | Confidence | Life | Life | Mathematics | Truth | Will | Value |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
The fount of joy was bubbling in thine eyes, dancing was in thy feet, and on thy lips a laugh that never dies, unutterably sweet. Dance on! forever young, forever fair, lightfooted as a frightened bounding deer, thy wreath of vine-leaves twisted in thy hair, through all the changing seasons of the year...
The guilty is he who meditates a crime; the punishment is his who lays the plot.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Men are in general so tricky, so envious, and so cruel, that when we find one who is only weak, we are happy.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.
Ignorance | Spirit | Superstition | Thought | Virginity | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |