Latest Quotes

“The old Knicks were used to taking responsibility for our own laundry because there was no equipment manager then, and strange as it may sound, washing our own uniforms had a unifying effect on the team. If the newcomers weren't willing to wash their own gear, we wondered whether they would take res…”

— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

“And so it was that after spending his entire adult life building his business, revolutionizing the industry, setting a new standard for meat quality, creating a famous brand, and racking up a couple hundred million dollars in sales, Niman wound up with nothing. Indeed, you might say less than nothin…”

— Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“You should build a business today as if you will own it forever but could sell it tomorrow... Oddly enough, you're far more likely to have a company that's built to last if you simultaneously build it to sell. You're also far more likely to have a happy exit.”

— Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“How could she ever understand that there isn't any way I could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?”

— Bret Easton Ellis, Patrick Bateman , American Psycho

“When we choose—if we commit—we are still one eye wandering at the options. We want the beautiful cut of filet mignon, but we're too busy eyeing the mediocre buffet, because choice. Because choice. Our choices are killing us. We think choice means something.”

— Jamie Varon, thoughtcatalog.com

“Ask just about anyone in a human resources department, 'What percent of the labor force do you simply not wish to hire, no matter what, no matter how low the wage?' It's quite a few of the applicants, and I can vouch that I have found the same when working as an employer myself. Or look at how many…”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”

— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Simple naming, with common nouns or with proper nouns or individuals' names, is the most archaic, and still the most basic operation for setting off the known intellectually from the knower, and thereby setting off known objects from one another.”

— Walter J Ong, Hopkins Self and God

“Still, how can we find the special character of space? There is an emergency path which, to be sure, is a narrow and precarious one. Let us try to listen to language. Whereof does it speak in the word 'space' ? Clearing-away is uttered therein. This means: to clear out, to free from wilderness. Clea…”

— Martin Heidegger, Kein.or

“Let us try to listen to language.”

— Martin Heidegger, kein.org

“Words, the only way toward self, prove unending detours.”

— Mariann Sanders Regan, Love Words: The Self and the Text in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry

“Discourse about a subject requires distance or 'objectivity' as well as proximity: the known has to be set off somehow from the knower.”

— Walter Ong, Hopkins Self and God

“To be present to himself, man must find the presence of another or others. Man's life-world is the opposite of solipsist: it is a world not of presence but of presences. In presences we mature. Each individual I finds himself by dealing with a thou, and another thou, and another. The presence of oth…”

— Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word

“For example, we normally predicate truth of propositional entities like assertions or beliefs. But we can grasp a proposition as potentially true or false only to the extent that we can understand how to use it to uncover or make salient a fact or state of affairs. So we could say that the being of…”

— Mark A. Wrathall , Heidegger and Unconcealment

“Whatever forces us to assume that there is an essential difference between 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume different levels of semblance, lighter and darker shadows and tones of semblance — different values in the painter's sense of the term?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

“Really, why should we be forced to assume that there is an essential difference between 'true' and 'false' in the first place? Isn't it enough to assume that there are degrees of apparency and, so to speak, lighter and darker shadows and hues of appearance—different valeurs to use the language of pa…”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

“The terms in mathematical definitions or axioms can never be fully defined, but at one point or another must be resolved on grounds other than those of formal mathematics, grounds where persons have some general agreement regarding the meaning of words in real life, as the foundations of mathematics…”

— Walter J Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture

“Pip is a kind of hero because he doesn't deny the lack of any ultimate meaning to the universe, but instead becomes a pure openness to it. To see God's foot upon the treadle of the loom and live, as Pip does, is to be deafened, to be made unfit for hearing any meaning as a human can. Indeed, after t…”

— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate…”

— Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell

“That which is ontically closest and well known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all; and its ontological signification is constantly overlooked.”

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time