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Chris Lavergne

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

“This impulse to imagine that we were meant to be the citizens of some other place. It is from this sensation that the angels come into existence, creating in this world their ambience of pure loss.”
— Robert Hass, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Tagged: Theology
“The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice.”
— Rudolf Kassner, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Tagged: Great Works
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
Tagged: Ideals, Perfection, Infinitely Striving
“The frames of thought in which the observations are set are often of more significance than the observations themselves.”
— Walter Ong, Rhetoric,Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture
Tagged: Medium = Message
“Real time has no divisions at all, but is uninterruptedly continuous: at midnight yesterday did not click over into today. No one can find the exact point of midnight, and if it is not exact, how can it be midnight? And we have no experience of today as being next to yesterday, as it is represented on a calendar. Reduced to space, time seems more under control—but only seems to be, for real, indivisible time carries us to real death. (This is not to deny that spatial reductionism is immeasurably useful and technologically necessary, but only to say that its accomplishments are intellectually limited, and can be deceiving.)”
— Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Time, Abstractions
“I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Identity
“Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody— with whom?— with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Identity, Mixed
“I see the only possibility of a salvation in preparing a readiness, in thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the God or for the absence of God in the case of decline; that we not, to put it coarsely, ‘come to a wretched end,’ but rather if we decline, we decline in the face of the absent God.”
— Martin Heidegger, Only A God Can Save Us
Tagged: Theology, Poetizing, My Philosophy, Heidegger’s Bridge
“A dead man’s face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists.”
— Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Tagged: Death
“All you have to do is write one true sentence.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Complete Poems
Tagged: Writing, Finding The Right Words