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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“It’s dangerous when you are older to start living in the past.”
— Katharine Graham, Personal History
Tagged: Combating Age, Getting Older
“Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.”
— Katharine Graham, Personal History
Tagged: Blind Jump
“Reality is structured by belief, by a faith in fantasy that we know to be a fantasy yet we believe nonetheless.”
— Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless
Tagged: Reality, Faith, Don’t Let It All Through
“The human being is the utter strangeness of action between two nothings. The self is a potentiality for being whose sole basis, limit, and condition of possibility is a double nothing, a double impotentialization, which of course is to say that it is also its condition of impossibility, an existential quasi-transcendental. Impotence— finally— is what makes us human. We should wear it as a badge of honor. It is the signal of our weakness, and nothing is more important or impotent than that.”
— Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless
Tagged: Nothing, Nihilism
“It's not about biology, but about consciousness.”
— Gloria Steinem, Gloria Steinem
Tagged: Forward Biology
“THE WORLD USED TO BE SILENT / NOW IT HAS TOO MANY VOICES / AND THE NOISE / IS A CONSTANT DISTRACTION / THEY MULTIPLY, INTENSIFY / THEY WILL DIVERT YOUR ATTENTION / TO WHAT’S CONVENIENT / AND FORGET TO TELL YOU / ABOUT YOURSELF / WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF MANY STIMULATIONS / IF YOU ARE FOCUSED / YOU ARE HARDER TO REACH / IF YOU ARE DISTRACTED / YOU ARE AVAILABLE / YOU ARE DISTRACTED / YOU ARE AVAILABLE / YOU WANT FLATTERY / ALWAYS LOOKING TO WHERE IT’S AT / YOU WANT TO TAKE PART IN EVERYTHING / AND EVERYTHING TO BE A PART OF YOU / YOUR HEAD IS SPINNING FAST / AT THE END OF YOUR SPINE / UNTIL YOU HAVE NO FACE AT ALL / AND YET / IF THE WORLD WOULD SHUT UP / EVEN FOR A WHILE / PERHAPS / WE WOULD START HEARING / THE DISTANT RHYTHM / OF AN ANGRY YOUNG TUNE – / AND RECOMPOSE OURSELVES / PERHAPS / HAVING DECONSTRUCTED EVERYTHING / WE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT / PUTTING EVERYTHING BACK TOGETHER / SILENCE YOURSELF.”
— Jehnny Beth, Gemma Thompson, Ayse Hassan, Fay Milton, Silence Yourself
Tagged: Manifestos, Silence, Turn Off, Simpler Times
“The content farmer is the dystopian new journalist, producing online content, typically for a large company, in an attempt to garner more advertising revenue because of the popularity of the topic. Here, the value impartation is done by others (droves, really) via algorithms. Value is thus proportional to popularity, and audience courting is synonymous with it. There is no better example of the darkest, most tautological aspects of accelerated curationism: rather than the simulated democracy (or, at least, simulated beneficence) of curated works being presented as attractive to a potential audience because they have been chosen exclusively and carefully for their value, the value in these content-farmed works lies not in preciousness but in popularity.”
— David Balzer, Curationism
Tagged: Digital Content, Digital Content Economics, Proportional Value, Relevance, Defining Quality, Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism
“The use of curator can be traced back to the Roman Empire, in which curatores were bureaucrats made responsible for various departments pertaining to public works. (Curatores viarum, for instance, were responsible for overseeing roads.) The root of the word is the Latin cura, meaning care; curatore means, essentially, caretaker.”
— David Balzer, Curationism
Tagged: Word Orgins, Curation, Curator
“Sometimes, when I’m in the midst of writing, I feel like I am suddenly walking on one of those moving sidewalks that you find in a big airport terminal. I can feel myself being gently propelled by some exterior force. Something is carrying me along — something powerful and generous— and that something is decidedly not me. You may know this feeling. It’s the feeling you get when you’ve made something wonderful, or done something wonderful, and when you look back at it later, all you can say is: 'I don’t even know where that came from.' I only rarely experience this feeling, but it’s the most magnificent sensation imaginable when it arrives.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
Tagged: Creatives on Flow, Flow, Muses
“Perhaps another reason people express anger, especially in the online realm, is because they allow themselves to be easily irritated by things they find bothersome or offensive, even things that have little or even no direct bearing on their lives. David Sirota calls it “the Fake Outrage Machine.” Using the admission of Olympian Michael Phelps that he smoked marijuana in 2009 as an example, Sirota argues that the United States has become 'a nation now addicted to fake outrage— a nation that feeds on made-up controversies about total non-issues.'”
— Andrea Weckerle, Civility in the Digital Age
Tagged: Outrage Machine, The Uprooting