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Chris Lavergne

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

“When we choose—if we commit—we are still one eye wandering at the options. We want the beautiful cut of filet mignon, but we're too busy eyeing the mediocre buffet, because choice. Because choice. Our choices are killing us. We think choice means something. ”
— Jamie Varon, thoughtcatalog.com
Tagged: Choice, Dating
“Ask just about anyone in a human resources department, 'What percent of the labor force do you simply not wish to hire, no matter what, no matter how low the wage?' It's quite a few of the applicants, and I can vouch that I have found the same when working as an employer myself. Or look at how many people are turned away by the US military: Drug use, medications, weight problems, bad credit scores, and criminal records make many people ineligible to sign up. According to Arne Duncan, secretary of education under President Obama, three-quarters of today's youth between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are unfit to serve for one reason or another. Three-quarters. Staggering, no?”
— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
Tagged: Economics, Jobs
“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Tagged: Friend, Friends, Friendship
“Simple naming, with common nouns or with proper nouns or individuals' names, is the most archaic, and still the most basic operation for setting off the known intellectually from the knower, and thereby setting off known objects from one another.”
— Walter J Ong, Hopkins Self and God
Tagged: Old Is New, Naming, Branding, Distinguishing
“Still, how can we find the special character of space? There is an emergency path which, to be sure, is a narrow and precarious one. Let us try to listen to language. Whereof does it speak in the word 'space' ? Clearing-away is uttered therein. This means: to clear out, to free from wilderness. Clearing-away brings forth the free,the openness for man's settling and dwelling. When thought in its own special character, clearing-away is the release of places toward which the fate of dwelling man turns in the preserve of the home or in the brokenness of homelessness or in complete indifference to the two. Clearing-away is release of the places at which a god appears, the places from which the gods have disappeared, the places at which the appearance of the godly tarries long. In each case, clearing-away brings forth locality preparing for dwelling. Secular spaces are always the privation of often very remote sacred spaces.”
— Martin Heidegger, Kein.or
Tagged: Clearing Farm, The Clearing
“Let us try to listen to language.”
— Martin Heidegger, kein.org
Tagged: Language, Language Answers
“Words, the only way toward self, prove unending detours.”
— Mariann Sanders Regan, Love Words: The Self and the Text in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry
Tagged: The Path Of Thinking
“Discourse about a subject requires distance or 'objectivity' as well as proximity: the known has to be set off somehow from the knower.”
— Walter Ong, Hopkins Self and God
Tagged: Knowing Knowing, Knowledge Approaches, Proximity
“To be present to himself, man must find the presence of another or others. Man's life-world is the opposite of solipsist: it is a world not of presence but of presences. In presences we mature. Each individual I finds himself by dealing with a thou, and another thou, and another. The presence of other persons fills man's consciousness, as objects cannot. Situated among objects, a person may indeed find them interesting, but he responds only other persons, other presences, who are not objects. In a whole universe filled with countless objects and occupied only by one other man alone, it would be to the man alone that I could present myself, establish a relationship of presence.”
— Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word
Tagged: Presences, Relationalism
“For example, we normally predicate truth of propositional entities like assertions or beliefs. But we can grasp a proposition as potentially true or false only to the extent that we can understand how to use it to uncover or make salient a fact or state of affairs. So we could say that the being of truth resides in uncovering. Thus Heidegger takes uncovering in a broad sense – lifting into salience – to be the ontological function of truth. He then applies the term in a broad sense to anything that uncovers. So, for instance, if I drive a nail into a board, I am uncovering the way a hammer is used. In this broad sense, my action, for Heidegger, is true – in hammering, I lift into salience what a hammer is and how it is used. Or if a building like a medieval cathedral supports the faithful in their efforts to inhabit a world opened up by God's grace, the cathedral is also true in the ontologically broad sense – it works by lifting into salience what is essential or most important about such a world, and supporting the disclosive practices of that world's inhabitants.”
— Mark A. Wrathall , Heidegger and Unconcealment
Tagged: Epistemology, Salience, Uncovering