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Chris Lavergne

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

“Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: Business, Carrers, Competition, Drama
“The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can't.”
— Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Tagged: Epistemology, fiction, Illusion, Narrative Fallacy, Simulacrum, Story, Truth
“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
— Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Tagged: Dreams, fiction, Reading, Sleep, Storytelling, Virtuality, Writing, Fiction Addiction, Best Reading Quotes
“Fiction may be, at least in part, a pleasure technology, a co-opting of language and imagery as a virtual reality device which allows a reader to enjoy pleasant hallucinations like exploring interesting territories, conquering enemies, hobnobbing with powerful people, and winning attractive mates. Fiction, moreover, can tickle people's fancies without even having to project them into a thrilling vicarious experience.”
— Steven Pinker, Harvard.edu
Tagged: fiction, Reading, Virtuality
“… There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Identity, Nihilism
“There is a psychoanalytic myth called the lamella. This is a word used in biology, botany, and anatomy to refer to a thin membrane or casing. Lacan used it to metaphorize the idea of a narcissitic shell, a myth employed to illustrate the stakes of love in the games of erotic passion and commitment. If we allow our desire to puncture this lamella, moving toward another, a piece of it is lost to us that we might seek to recuperate. Narcissistic love wants to get this little fragment back, to be compensated by another for having emerged from the safety of our membranous enclosure. The contract is set up: if I love you, then you must consent to give back to me what I have lost in doing so. Love becomes a system of mutual favors in which loss is ultimately avoided. Happily, there is another way. What causes us to desire— to leave the safety of an insular, lamellar world— punctures a hole in the very heart of our being. Through the other we can come closer to what we have lost. Love makes this absence present. To love passionately is this commerce of nothings, which is why love is defined more by the little nothings whispered between lovers than any bodily union.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Love, Narcissism
“Life is a detour for an organism that came from nothing and will soon return to nothing.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Ashes to Ashes, Life, Nihilism
“The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Tagged: Fragmentation, Tribalism, Writing, Alphabet
“Had religion been maintained among the princes of Christendom on the footing on which it was established by its Founder, the Christian States and republics had been far more united and far more prosperous than they now are; nor can we have surer proof of its decay than in witnessing how those countries which are the nearest neighbours of the Roman Church,the head of our faith, have less devoutness than any others; so that any one who considers its earliest beginnings and observes how widely different is its present practice, might well believe its ruin or its chastisement to be close at hand.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, gutenberg.org
Tagged: Theory and Practice
“If such religion had been maintained by the princes of the Christian republic as was ordered by its giver, the Christian states and republics would be more united, much happier than they are. Nor can one make any better conjecture as to its decline than to see that those peoples who are closest to the Roman church, the head of our religion, have less religion. Whoever might consider its foundations and see how much present usage is different from them might judge, without doubt, that either its ruin or its scourging is near.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy
Tagged: Evolution