You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the idea that individual perception is central to one's reality; when a solipsist dies, their unique perspective and reality cease to exist.
David Foster Wallace's quote reflects the philosophical concept of solipsism, which posits that only one's mind is sure to exist. When a solipsist passes away, not only does their personal experience and consciousness vanish, but so does the world as they perceived it, illustrating the isolation and subjectivity of individual reality.
In practice
In a philosophy class discussing the nature of reality and existence.
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.
My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I'm told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, but its silver when its wet, and all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet.
Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.
God's ways do not change... Still he shows his freedom and lordship by discriminating between sinners, causing some to hear the gospel while others do not hear it, and moving some of those who hear it to repentance while leaving others in their unbelief, thus teaching his saints that hew owes mercy to none and that it is entirely of his grace, not at all through their own effort, that they themselves have found life.
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.
Has not the experience of two centuries shown that gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice? Is there an instance, in the history of the world, where slaves have been educated for freedom by their task-masters?
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
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