You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The most significant truths in life are often overlooked and difficult to articulate.
David Foster Wallace highlights the idea that the most crucial aspects of our existence, which are all around us, can be the hardest for us to recognize and discuss. This suggests that profound insights often lie in the ordinary, yet they require reflection and honesty to uncover and express.
Themes
RealityPerceptionTruthAwarenessCommunication
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about self-awareness and personal growth, you might use this quote to explain how we often miss recognizing our own biases.
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.
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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.
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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
The truth is always an abyss. One must β as in a swimming pool β dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again β laughing and fighting for breath β to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
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Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
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The visionary is the only realist.
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All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
Immanuel KantRead
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.
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In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination
Mark TwainRead