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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 really was blue: purple-blue in the distance, peacock-blue coming nearer, diamond-blue where the wave caught the light. The foam toppled over, ran, slowed down, then receded, leaving a smooth mirror on the wet sand, which the next wave flooded again.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Descriptions of the Ocean, Ocean, Sea, The Beach, Water
“Now in such an age, conviction politicians may well spring up in large numbers all of a sudden, and run riot, declaring, 'The world is stupid and nasty, not I. The responsibility for the consequences cannot be laid at my door but must rest with those who employ me and whose stupidity or nastiness I shall do away with.' And if this happens, I shall say openly that I would begin by asking how much inner gravity lies behind this ethics of conviction, and I suspect I should come to the conclusion that in nine cases out of ten I was dealing with windbags who do not genuinely feel what they are taking on themselves but who are making themselves drunk on romantic sensations. Humanly, this is of little interest, and it fails utterly to shake my own convictions. By the same token, I find it immeasurably moving when a mature human being – whether young or old in actual years is immaterial – who feels the responsibility he bears for the consequences of his own actions with his entire soul and who acts in harmony with an ethics of responsibility reaches the point where he says 'Here I stand, I can do no other.' This is authentically human and cannot fail to move us.”
— Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures
Tagged: Inner Gravity, Revolution
“The only man who has a 'vocation' for politics is one who is certain that his spirit will not be broken if the world, when looked at from his point of view, proves too stupid or base to accept what he wishes to offer it, and who, when faced with all that obduracy, can still say 'Nevertheless!' despite everything.”
— Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures
Tagged: Ethics, Neverthless, How To Live, My Philosophy
“'So much the better,' thought Margot, and suddenly she felt extremely elated. When she had sent off the letter she had anticipated a far more trivial consequence: he refuses to show it, wife gets wild, stamps, has a fit. So the first suspicions are roused and that eases the way. But now chance had helped her and the way was made clear at one stroke. She let the book slip to the floor and smiled as she looked at his downcast twitching face. It was time to act, she supposed. Margot stretched herself out, was aware of a pleasant tingling in her slim body and said, gazing up at the ceiling, 'Come here.' He came, sat down on the edge of the couch and shook his head despondently. 'Kiss me,' she said, closing her eyes. 'I'll comfort you.'”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Machiavellian Machinations, Overwhelmed
“Now, as he strolled along in the mild sunshine, he realized that the reckoning was about to begin. When he saw again the house in which he had lived for so long with Elisabeth; when he went up in the lift in which the nurse with his baby in her arms, and his wife, looking very pale and happy, had gone up eight years before; when he stood before the door upon which his scholarly name gleamed sedately, Albinus was almost prepared to renounce any repetition of the previous night, if only a miracle had happened. He was sure that if Elisabeth had not read the letter, he would be able to explain his absence somehow—he might say he had tried, in jest, smoking opium at the rooms of that Japanese artist who had once come to dinner—that would be quite plausible.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Reckoning, Vanishing Point
“Her gaiety, too, was like her mother's—a singular unobtrusive gaiety. It was just a quiet delight in one's own existence with a faint note of humorous surprise at being alive at all—yes, that was the tenor of it: mortal gaiety.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Lack of Gravity, Mortal Gaiety, Simple
“She was a clinging little soul, docile and gentle. Her love was of the lily variety; but now and then it burst into flame and at such times Albinus was deluded into thinking that he had no need of any other love-mate.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Love, Love Delusions
“This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Condensed, Details, No Point So What, We Might As Well
“For now, though, he'd just have to add her name to the list of people he cared about who'd moved on. It was getting to be a long list, and it contained some pretty important names. In time, he thought, Aimee would probably seem like a footnote, but just now her absence felt bigger than that, like maybe she deserved a whole page to herself.”
— Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
Tagged: Absence, Let Go, Letting Go, Memory, Rapture
“To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say—that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself.”
— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Tagged: Hearkening, Reticence, The Secret of Secrecy