Crowds stand around all day long and criticise that bridge, and find fault with it, and tell with unlimited frankness how it ought to have been planned, and how they would have built it had the city granted them the $14,000 it cost. It is really refreshing to hang around these and listen to them. A foreigner would come to the conclusion that all America was composed of inspired professional bridge builders.
When you build a bridge, you insist that it can carry 30,000 pounds, but you only drive 10,000-pound trucks across it. And that same principle works in investing.
No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.
Oscar Wilde said the rich and the poor are equal - they can both sleep under the bridge. Right? Do they have a right? You're damn right they have a right!
Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.
I waited for the train at Coventry; I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge, To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped The city's ancient legend into this.
I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem - just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.
Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew — (Twenty bridges or twenty two) — Wanted to know what the River knew, For they were young, and the Thames was old And this is the tale that River told.
Building new roads and bridges creates jobs. Growing our exports creates jobs. Reforming our outdated tax system and our broken immigration system creates jobs.
If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help... Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business - you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand; I saw from out the wave of her structure's rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble pines, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.
In an inflationary world, a toll bridge (like company) would be a great thing to own because you've laid out the capital costs. You built it in old dollars and you don't have to keep replacing it.