Claude Levi-Strauss's Quotes

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.

I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.

I think I'm the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ - I'm pretty annoying, but driven.

It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.

My acronym is WWSJD: What Would Steve Jobs Do?

My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee.

All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.

I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.

I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.

I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it's important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It's best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.

I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that's cliche, I don't know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.

I'm certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me.

If you think about the market that we're in, and more broadly just the enterprise software market, the kind of transition that's happening right now from legacy systems to the cloud is literally, by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'What's the party going on right now that I should be going to?'

It's not accidental that products get worse over time; it's because companies stop paying attention to them. They stop caring as much about maintaining the same quality they did when they were just trying to fight for survival and no one would pay attention unless they had the best technology.

My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends' parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.

My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.

My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.