You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
Interpretation
Logical validity does not ensure that something is true; it means it follows a structure that makes it coherent.
This quote by David Foster Wallace suggests that just because an argument is logically sound does not necessarily mean the conclusion it leads to is true. It emphasizes the distinction between valid reasoning and factual accuracy, reminding us that logical structures can be applied to false premises or assumptions, leading to incorrect conclusions despite their internal coherence.
In practice
In a debate about ethics, one might refer to this quote to highlight how valid arguments can still reach incorrect conclusions.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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 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.
The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization.
To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
It sounds to me, young one," Haddek said, "that you are searching for something that cannot be found." "The truth?" Sazed said. "No," Haddek replied. "A religion that requires no faith of its believers.
To manage your mind, know that there is nothing, and then relinquish all attachment to nothingness.
The past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.
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