You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Familiarity may distort our perception, making us complacent and blind to deeper truths.
David Foster Wallace suggests that what we often perceive as familiarity in our lives can be misleading. It encourages us to be aware that our understanding of the world is shaped by our experiences and perceptions, which may not always reflect reality. By questioning this familiarity, we can gain a clearer insight into our surroundings and ourselves.
Themes
FamiliarityPerceptionRealityAwarenessMeditation
In practice
Example use cases
A public speaker might use this quote to highlight the importance of questioning our assumptions.
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
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
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
David Foster WallaceRead
Similar quotes
We have a tendency to think of war as this quasi-mystical thing, and that interpretation flattens the experience - by using different perspectives, I wanted to open a place for readers to compare and contrast, to make judgments, to engage.
Phil KlayRead
The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese. That, in erotic terms, is the Catholic church, in a nutshell.
Stephen FryRead
Where persons love little, do little, and give little, we may shrewdly suspect that they have never had much affliction of heart for their sins and that they think they owe but very little to divine grace.
Charles SpurgeonRead
My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.
Mark TwainRead
Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings.... Leave and don't look away from the sun as you go, in whose light you're sometimes crescent, sometimes full.
RumiRead
Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.
June JordanRead