You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
Interpretation
What this quote means
Love can be an uncontrollable force that we experience without conscious choice.
In this quote, David Foster Wallace explores the idea that love often transcends choice and rationality. He suggests that love can strike suddenly, leaving us devoid of the ability to weigh options or make calculations, as if we are drawn to it by an uncontrollable force, symbolically likening this to the expression 'the temple comes to Mohammed' which implies that sometimes circumstances lead us to love without us actively seeking it.
Themes
LoveChoiceEmotionSurrenderPassion
In practice
Example use cases
During a wedding speech, one might refer to this quote to express the uncontrollable nature of love.
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.
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 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.
David Foster WallaceRead
Similar quotes
Of all the Gods, Love is the best friend of humankind, the helper and healer of all ills that stand in the way of human happiness.
PlatoRead
We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. I want to hold you close like a lute, so that we can cry out with loving. Would you rather throw stones at a mirror? I am your mirror and here are the stones.
RumiRead
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
Honore De BalzacRead
And you'll always love me won't you? Yes And the rain won't make any difference? No
Ernest HemingwayRead
There are as many loves as there are hearts.
Leo TolstoyRead
Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet; and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget.
Christina RossettiRead