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Chris Lavergne

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

“In few other professions are you required, each and every day, to weigh so many competing claims— between different sets of constituents, between the interests of your state and the interests of the nation, between party loyalty and your own sense of independence, between the value of service and obligations to your family. There is a constant danger, in the cacophony of voices, that a politician loses his moral bearings and finds himself entirely steered by the winds of public opinion.”
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Tagged: Competing Interests, Complexity of Political Situations, (Example of Good Tags), Weight of Too Many Choices
“Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us— when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them— that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we're engaged in is fundamentally pointless. Instead of reaching for the video game controller or turning on soap operas, is it perhaps time to raise your voice and state the obvious? If you're feeling like this, chances are others are too.”
— Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required
Tagged: Distractions, Work Strategies
“I no longer want to read bad writing. Information is not the same as writing. Just because you can type, that does not make the result readable. Then again, writing, good writing, is rarely profitable, so the whole Internet is laden with link-bait, which I occasionally click on, illustrating that the Internet terrorists have won.”
— Bob Lefsetz, Lefsetz.com
Tagged: Clickbait, Writing, Populist Economics
“Life propagates itself by ceaselessly adding to itself what it successively acquires — like a memory… Something passes, something grows, through the long chain of living creatures.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future Of Man
Tagged: Conservation
“And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah… when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?”
— Iggy Pop, Vimeo.com
Tagged: Flow, Music, Creation Processes, This Is Creating
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”
— T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays
Tagged: Relationalism
“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”
— T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot
Tagged: Conservation
“Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak beam. But now I am compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Conservation
“A corporate headquarters, like Random House's imposing skyscraper at 1745 Broadway in New York, may look to the casual observer like the house of a well-ordered bureaucracy where all procedures have been formalized and standardized, but in reality it is more like a conservatory that houses a plurality of micro-environments, each of which is allowed to grow its own exotic varieties of vegetation provided that it meets certain conditions.”
— John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture
Tagged: Book Publishing, Plurality
“Organizations become bureaucratic as soon as people define their job around a specific rule, or feature, rather than a goal. For example, if you tell me my job is to cook the french fries, I will resist anything that threatens the existence of french fries, since when they go away, so does my job. But if you tell me my job is to make side dishes for customers, I'll be open to changing from fries to onion rings or other side dishes, even ones we've yet to invent, since my identity isn't tied to a particular side dish but instead to the role side dishes play. Bureaucracies form when people's jobs are tied strictly to rules and procedures rather than the effect those things are supposed to have on the world.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress
Tagged: Against Bureaucracy