QuoteProject
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
David Foster Wallace
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The ability to overcome boredom is crucial for achieving great things in life.

David Foster Wallace emphasizes the importance of being able to transcend boredom in order to truly engage with life and overcome its mundane aspects. He suggests that if one can cultivate immunity to boredom, they unlock a vast potential for achievements and experiences, highlighting boredom as a significant barrier to creativity and accomplishment.

Themes

BoredomCreativityPotentialAccomplishmentEngagement

In practice

Example use cases

In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.

More from David Foster Wallace

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
Everything 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
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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 you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
David Foster WallaceRead

Similar quotes

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.
Max LernerRead
If you're determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so. The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.
Yongey Mingyur RinpocheRead
If you would win the world, melt it, do not hammer it.
Alexander MaclarenRead
It is great that even before we become enlightened or generate any lam-rim realizations we are able to offer incredible benefit to others. The person who does this is a very fortunate person and should rejoice very often.
Thubten Zopa RinpocheRead
It is another's fault if he be ungrateful, but it is mine if I do not give. To find one thankful man, I will oblige a great many that are not so.
Seneca The YoungerRead
Rise above the deceptions and temptations of the mind. This is your duty. You are born for this only; all other duties are self-created and self-imposed owing to ignorance.
SivanandaRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.