You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
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.
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
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
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 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
Similar quotes
It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.
Ray BradburyRead
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
Marcel ProustRead
The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
Edmund BurkeRead
The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is always within the shadow of ignorance. Meditation is freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth. Meditation is explosion of intelligence.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiRead
may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living
E. E. CummingsRead
I had much rather be adorned by beauty of character than by jewels. Jewels are the gift of fortune, character comes from within.
PlautusRead