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Chris Lavergne

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

“The only proof of love may be the ease with which it can be betrayed.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Love
“Our sense of time is notoriously subjective and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and deadlines. Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present— the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower. There is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement with infinitely greater richness of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”
— Alan W Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Tagged: Time
“There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such mescaline, LSD, or psilocybin. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge. They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his behavior and the whole system of his knowledge.”
— Alan W Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Tagged: Inner Experience
“We once believed ourselves to understand it, but are now in difficulty.”
— Plato, The Sophist
Tagged: The Clearing, Socrates Thesis, You Know Nothing, Philosophical
“Slowly it becomes clear...”
— Alan W Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Tagged: The Clearing
“The lowbrow way of forgetting oneself is to get drunk, to be diverted with entertainments, or to exploit such natural means of self-transcendence as sexual intercourse. The highbrow way is to throw oneself into the pursuit of the arts, of social service, or of religious mysticism. These measures are rarely successful because they do not disclose the basic error of the split self. The highbrow ways even aggravate the error to the extent that those who follow them take pride in forgetting themselves by purely mental means — even though the artist uses paints or sounds, the social idealist distributes material wealth, and the religionist uses sacraments and rituals, or such other physical means as fasting, yoga breathing, or dervish dancing. And there is a sound instinct in the use of these physical aids, as in the repeated insistence of mystics that to know about God is not enough: transformation of the self is only through realizing or feeling God. The hidden point is that man cannot function properly through changing anything so superficial as the order of his thoughts, of his dissociated mind. What has to change is the behavior of his organism; it has to become self-controlling instead of self-frustrating.”
— Alan W Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Tagged: Entertainment, Identity, Media Manipulation
“For a long time we have been accustomed to the compartmentalization of religion and science as if they were two quite different and basically unrelated ways of seeing the world. I do not believe that this state of doublethink can last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the world which is neither religious nor scientific but simply our view of the world. More exactly, it must become a view of the world in which the reports of science and religion are as concordant as those of the eyes and the ears.”
— Alan W Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Tagged: Seeing Seeing
“In the first Reformation, the Bible was translated into the common vernacular, printed, and mass-produced, providing direct access to the 'word of God,' which had previously been protected by the priests. With psychedelics, many people now have direct and unmediated access to the mystical and visionary experience, instead of reading about it in musty old tomes. ”
— Daniel Pinchbeck, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Tagged: Printing Press, Progress, Unraveling
“Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Evil, Surface, God is dead
“But even after admitting this — and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed — and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Self Discovery