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Chris Lavergne

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

“If we recognize the plant as an autonomous power which enters in order to put roots and flowers in us, then we distance ourselves by several degrees from the skewed perspective which imagines that spirit (Geist) is the monopoly of human beings and doesn't exist outside of them. A new world-picture has to follow the planetary leveling; that is the task which the next century will take up.”
— Ernst Jünger, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere
Tagged: Spirit, The Secret Lives of Plants
“What sustains us, if not the mysterious ray of light which sometimes flashes through the inner wilderness? People wish to speak, however imperfectly, of that which to them is more than human.”
— Ernst Jünger, The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios
Tagged: Light, Mystery, Wilderness, Light Sustenance
“The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. That's the honest position, given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body, incarnate in a time and space. In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If you have to inoculate yourself against the various memes of closure that are around, psychedelics do that. That's why they are so politically controversial and potent because—more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake—they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning. They show that these things are provisional, and that beneath the level of culture there is lurking this erotic, time-andspace-bound, feeling-defined, pre-linguistic mode of being, which is real being. Not becoming, not caught in the various fetishistic forms of tension that commodification of culture and delayed gratification and all these other buzzwords create, but a deeper level of authentic feeling. And it was there all the time, but is denied by the culture.”
— Terence McKenna, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere
Tagged: Openness
“Hailed by the whole, one can become healed through ecodelic practice precisely because the subject turns back on who they thought they were, becoming aware of the existence of a whole, a system in which everything 'really is' connected—the noösphere. Such a vision can be discouraging and even frightening to the phantasmically self-birthed ego, who feels not guilt but a horror of exocentricity. It appears impossible to many of us that anything hierarchically distinct, and larger and more complex than Homo sapiens—such as Gaia—could exist, and so we often cry out as one in the wilderness, in amazement and repetition.”
— Richard M. Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere
Tagged: Drugs, Ego Loss, Identity, Noösphere
“You poor baby! And yet—you selfish little bastard! As I try to find the agent behind the act, the motivating force at the bottom of the whole thing, I seem to see only an endless ambivalence. Behind the mask of love I find my innate selfishness. What a predicament I am in if someone asks, 'Do you really love me?' I can't say yes without saying no, for the only answer that will really satisfy is, 'Yes, I love you so much I could eat you! My love for you is identical with my love for myself. I love you with the purest selfishness.' No one wants to be loved out of a sense of duty.”
— Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Tagged: Love, The Center
“Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear. ”
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born
Tagged: Consciousness, Identity
“The world is filled with Knowledge; it is almost empty of Understanding. For, let me tell you, Knowledge is of the head, Understanding is of the heart. Knowledge is of the intellect, Understanding is of instinct.”
— Louis H Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats And Other Writings
Tagged: Understanding
“I have sought with all due insistence to impress upon you, as a maxim, the simple truth that the heart is greater, worthier, nobler, finer than the head: that the heart is the sanctuary of the Temple of Man, the head its portal. That from the heart comes forth Sympathy into the open: the subtlest, the tenderest, the most human of emotions; and that of Sympathy is born that child of delight which illumines our pathway, and which we call Imagination. ”
— Louis H Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats And Other Writings
Tagged: Imagination, Magic, Romanticism, Sympahty
“Wright holds that the city will inevitably decay and disappear because he imagines electrification and physical mobility as the dynamic factors in contemporary history, sweeping and carrying all before them. ”
— Morton Gabriel White, The Intellectual Versus The City: From Thomas Jefferson To Frank Lloyd Wright
Tagged: City, Electricity, Network, Urbanization
“I walk away, hailing a taxi, and heading toward Hubert's in it I hallucinate the buildings into mountains, into volcanoes, the streets become jungles, the sky freezes into a backdrop, and before stepping out of the cab I have to cross my eyes in order to clear my vision. Lunch at Hubert's becomes a permanent hallucination in which I find myself dreaming while still awake.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Hallucinate