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
No matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
—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
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
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 truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
—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
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
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