You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing and confronting the mundane aspects of life that can hinder personal growth.
In this quote, David Foster Wallace highlights the often-overlooked challenges posed by routine and monotony in life. He asserts that these elements are formidable adversaries to anyone striving for significance and fulfillment, suggesting that awareness and confrontation of these 'enemies' is crucial for personal development and avoiding a life of unexamined tedium. Wallace invites us to acknowledge that while we may have time, the way we engage with our daily experiences shapes our existence profoundly.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a keynote speech on personal development, you can quote this to emphasize the need for self-awareness.
More from David Foster Wallace
All quotes →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.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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.
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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.
Similar quotes
Enlightenment for a wave is the moment the wave realizes it is water. At that moment, all fear of death disappears.
Use your health while you have it, my dear friend and brother. Do not cast away peculiar opportunities that may never come again. You know not when your last Sabbath with your people may come. Speak for eternity. Above all things, cultivate your own spirit. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God's Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.
No one wants to hear everything that's in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out of your mouth.
I'm not perfect. But I'll always be real
Thus, when the lamp that lighted The traveller at first goes out, He feels awhile benighted, And looks around in fear and doubt. But soon, the prospect clearing, By cloudless starlight on he treads, And thinks no lamp so cheering As that light which Heaven sheds.
There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness. One With Life.