Larissa MacFarquhar Quotes & Sayings

To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship. — Larissa MacFarquhar

The moral narcissist's extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not. — Larissa MacFarquhar

The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. — Larissa MacFarquhar

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families
only to find that by then their families were gone. — Larissa MacFarquhar

To judge is to believe that a person is capable of doing better. It's to know that people can change their behavior, even quite radically in response to what is expected of them. — Larissa MacFarquhar

What are we? What is our life? Our goodness? Our righteousness? - THE ASHAMNU, the Jewish shorter confession — Larissa MacFarquhar

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals ... It is too readily assumed ... that the ordinary man only rejects [saintliness] because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. — Larissa MacFarquhar

Is it OK to say, "these are the things that I value. This is what I'm going to pursue in life"? — Larissa MacFarquhar