You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Familiarity may distort our perception, making us complacent and blind to deeper truths.
David Foster Wallace suggests that what we often perceive as familiarity in our lives can be misleading. It encourages us to be aware that our understanding of the world is shaped by our experiences and perceptions, which may not always reflect reality. By questioning this familiarity, we can gain a clearer insight into our surroundings and ourselves.
Themes
FamiliarityPerceptionRealityAwarenessMeditation
In practice
Example use cases
A public speaker might use this quote to highlight the importance of questioning our assumptions.
More from David Foster Wallace
All quotes βEverything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
David Foster WallaceRead
Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.
David Foster WallaceRead
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
David Foster WallaceRead
Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like youβve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and itβs like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
David Foster WallaceRead
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
David Foster WallaceRead
Similar quotes
It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.
DiogenesRead
Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.
Haruki MurakamiRead
Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain: A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
Sylvia PlathRead
I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.
Malcolm XRead
Psychologism is, I believe, correct only in so far as it insists upon what may be called 'methodological individualism' as opposed to 'methodological collectivism'; it rightly insists that the 'behaviour' and the 'actions' of collectives, such as states or social groups, must be reduced to the behaviour and to the actions of human individuals. But the belief that the choice of such an individualist method implies the choice of a psychological method is mistaken.
Karl PopperRead