He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away.
—David Foster Wallace
Topics: Rationality
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing…It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.
—David Foster Wallace
What are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.
—David Foster Wallace
No matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
—David Foster Wallace
We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?
—David Foster Wallace
Topics: Loneliness
Real leaders help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
—David Foster Wallace
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
Ken Kesey American Novelist
Philip K. Dick American Novelist
Herman Melville American Novelist
Barbara Kingsolver American Novelist, Essayist
William S. Burroughs American Novelist
Elizabeth Gilbert American Novelist
William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
John Steinbeck American Novelist