You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Icons represent abstract ideas rather than real, living connections with individuals.
This quote by David Foster Wallace suggests that when we elevate someone to the status of an icon, we strip away their humanity and complexities, reducing them to an abstraction. As a result, this abstraction can create a disconnect, preventing genuine communication and understanding with real, living people, thereby emphasizing the importance of connecting on a human level rather than idolizing figures as mere symbols.
Themes
IconAbstractionCommunicationHuman ConnectionPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about celebrity culture, one might say, 'As David Foster Wallace pointed out, making someone an icon reduces them to an abstraction, hindering genuine communication.'
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
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John DonneRead
Why does no one confess his sins? Because he is yet in them. It is for a man who has awoke from sleep to tell his dreams.
Seneca The YoungerRead
The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.
John GreenRead
She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
Lewis CarrollRead
When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.
Steven PinkerRead
Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.
William Ellery ChanningRead