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
The city fireman-the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the close-pack'd square, the arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and daring, the strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling in line, the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water, the slender, spasmic, blue-white jets-the bringing to bear of the hooks and ladders, and their execution, the crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through floors, if the fire smolders under them, the crowd with their lit faces, watching-the glare and dense shadows.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I never could explain why I love anybody, or anything.
Mind |
After we have done our best work and vigorously pursued our most passionate modes of reading, the text—and the God featured in the text— remain inscrutable and undomesticated. Partly the reason for that inscrutability and lack of domestication is that the text in its final form is complex and pluralistic, hosting a variety of traditioning and interpreting voices that become normative traditions. More than that, however, the inscrutability and lack of domestication in the text are a consequences of the God attested in these pages who is Holy Other.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life.
What a commission it is to speak a future that none think imaginable! Of course that cannot be done by inventing new symbols for that is wishful thinking. Rather it means to move back into the deepest memories of this community and activate those very symbols that have always been the very basis for contradicting the regnant consciousness. Therefore the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history. And when the prophet returns with the community to those deep symbols they will discern that hope is not a late tacked on hypothesis to serve a crisis but rather the primal dimension of every memory of this community. The memory of this community begins in God's promissory address to the darkness of chaos, to barren Sarah, and to oppressed Egyptian slaves. The speech of God is first about an alternative future.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
The grapholect bears the marks of the millions of minds which have used it to share their consciousnesses with one another. Into it has been hammered a massive vocabulary of an order of magnitude impossible for an oral tongue. Webster's Third New World Dictionary (1971) states in its Preface that it could have included "many times" more than the 450,000 words it does include. Assuming that "many times" must mean at least three times, and rounding out the figures, we can understand that the editors have on hand a record of some million and a half words used in print in English. Oral languages and oral dialects can get along with perhaps five thousand words or less.
To say nothing of its holiness or authority, the Bible contains more specimens of genius and taste than any other volume in existence.
Man |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.
Meaning | Need | Precision | Rest | Words | Writing | Precision |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Most persons are distressed, and many depressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhumane pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product.
Consciousness | Individual | Knowledge | Meaning | Sense | System | Unique | Words | Writing |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.
Change | Life | Life | Meaning | Opportunity | People | Search | Think |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage - leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
A woman is more considerate in affairs of love than a man; because love is more the study and business of her life.
The very difference of character in marriage produces a harmonious combination.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
Let us live gladly! Quite certainly we are free to do it. Perhaps it is our only freedom, but ours it is, and it is only phenomenally a freedom. "Living free" is being "as one is." Can we not do it now? Indeed can we not-do-it? It is not even a "doing": It is beyond doing and not-doing. It is being as-we-are.
Authority | Meaning | Metaphysics | Method | People | Question | Sense | Understand |