This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities.
The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
Democracy | Force | Majority | Rule | Sacred | War | Trouble |
The contemporary abrasion between imperial ideology and poetic alternative is a contentious one, with the poetic alternative being fragile and mostly unauthorized and unrecognized.
Capitalism | Church | Force |
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Attention | Devotion | Force | Inactivity |
Ah, what avails the sceptred race! Ah, what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes may weep, but never see, a night of memories and sighs I consecrate to thee.
Fame | Heaven | Land | Little | Love | Nothing | Peace | World | Worth |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible situation, and you have to make your language work so as to come clear all by itself, with no existential context. The need for this exquisite circumspection makes writing the agonizing work it commonly is.
If there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt; if there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no wisdom, no knowledge, no genius.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
We have reached a period today when the accumulation of knowledge has made possible insights of new clarity and depth into the history of knowledge itself. Growth of knowledge soon produces growth in knowledge about knowledge, its constitution, and its history, for knowledge is of itself reflective. Given time, it will try to explain not only the world but itself more and more.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.
Experience | Past | Worth |
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 |
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.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
A non-doer is very often a critic – that is, someone who sits back and watches doers, and then waxes philosophically about how the doers are doing. It's easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk, and change.