Quotessence
Home / Books / This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Book by David Foster Wallace · 15 quotes · This Is Water, Attentiveness, Mindfulness

Filter quotes by topic

AllThis Is WaterAttentivenessMindfulnessPataphysicsPeoplePersonsStuffZenArrogantAtheismAttentionAttention SpanAwarenessBoredCertainCertaintyCheckoutsClicheCommencementConscious

This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life Quotes

“The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”

LittlesCertainTurnsStuffAwarenessHugeCriticalCertaintyArrogantPercentagesDeluded
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image

“Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.”

PeoplePersonsI CanForceLinesHarderPainfulBoredFrustratedTediousSupermarketsLikelihoodCheckoutsPainful Life
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image

“This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.”

PersonsSelfMatterHardNaturalVirtueSettingSettingsLensesSelf CenteredDefault
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image

“the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in the traffic jam...”

PeopleFrustrationRoutine
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

GodAtheismWorshipIdols
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image

“The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.”

EducationIntellectualZenPataphysicsEducational SystemAttention SpanThis Is Water
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image

“Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

ExerciseMindfulnessZenMeaningConscious AwarenessAttentiveness
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image

“It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in...the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

CommencementDfwThis Is Water
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.”

Life
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Create image