You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Entertainment offers escape, while art encourages deeper interaction and contemplation.
In this quote, David Foster Wallace emphasizes the difference between entertainment and art. While entertainment can serve as a temporary distraction from the stresses of life, art goes beyond mere enjoyment by provoking thought, encouraging engagement with deeper questions, and fostering a connection to human experience.
Themes
EntertainmentArtEngagementReliefProvocation
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a discussion about the role of art in society.
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.
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It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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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.
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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
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