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Chris Lavergne

4,404 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,404 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
Tagged: Into The Void, Superficial, Theology
“The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, 'virtue is the health of the soul,' would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: 'your virtue is the health of your soul.' For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the 'equality of men,' the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul. In one person, of course, this health could look like its opposite in another person. Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness — even for the sake of our virtue — and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
Tagged: Equality, Health, Medicine, The Great Reversal
“The pleasures of writing include acting like exaggerations of your most-extreme self. ”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Reddit.com
Tagged: Extreme, Writing
“'No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the world of this time with iron, the call of the desert would break all chains. Truly, I prepare you for solitude.'”
— Carl Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition (Philemon)
Tagged: Chains, Desert, Sacrifice, Solitude
“Why is this so hard for so many of us? It's not because we need the email for our productivity, but because we are addicted to the possibility that there's a great tidbit in there somewhere. Like compulsive gamblers at a slot machine rewarded with a few quarters every dozen tries, we are trained to keep opening emails in the hope of a little shot of serotonin — a pleasant ping from the world of chronos. We must retrain ourselves instead to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Emai, Email, Time Managment
“The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it's quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that's fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”
— Emerson Spartz, newyorker.com
Tagged: Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism, Defining Quality, High Power, Obscurity, Quality
“I realized that influence was inextricably linked to impact—the more influence you had, the more impact you could create... The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest that we could get to having a human superpower.”
— Emerson Spartz, newyorker.com
Tagged: Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism, Impact vs. Infulence, Viral, Viral Media
“Every day I got up, went to work, and got hit in the face with something that I never could have predicted from a business that I'd originally started so I wouldn't have to talk to people. I went from doing small tasks with measurable results (selling more clothes!) to abstractions like going on E! News to talk about what's hot, or speaking at a conference. I didn't want to talk about my job— I wanted to do my job. But then talking about my job became my job. Even worse, people expected me to be a certain way just because I'd accomplished something. A sizeable part of me resented the fact that I had to choose my words carefully.”
— Sophia Amoruso, #GIRLBOSS
Tagged: Business Changes, Growth, Unpredictable, Impossible To Predict
“Goethe speaks for the artist, and his own position with regard to standards is quite clear: he represents the humanistic tradition which places responsibility for the fate of culture and individual morality in the hands of the intellectual elite. This elite betrays its mission when it plays up to the cheap instincts of the populace by producing inferior books and vulgar plays. In other words, Goethe does not ask how the writer could go about gaining the attention of a large public, but the opposite: how can the public be persuaded to undertake the intellectual effort required by true art.”
— Leo Löwenthal, Literature and Mass Culture
Tagged: Creative Objectives, Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism, Culture Industry, Defining Quality, Pop Culture
“Goethe is not disturbed because of this restless urge for novelty in itself, but rather because it prevents the kind of ripening that is essential to the creative process—that in the constant reading of newspapers about the events of yesterday. For instance, one 'wastes the days and lives from hand to mouth. without creating anything.'”
— Leo Löwenthal, Literature and Mass Culture
Tagged: ADD, Creative Process, Newspapers, Novelty