I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

—David Foster Wallace

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About David Foster Wallace

Portrait of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and professor who published novels, short stories, and essays. He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time magazine named one of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. In...

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This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now: . . . there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like "Yeah, but, you know . . . ," and "Who cares?" and "It's all bullshit anyway.

—David Foster Wallace

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More quotations tagged with “consciousness”

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.

—James Thurber

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Whatever the philosophers may say, it remains true that, from the first hour of man's waking consciousness until that consciousness ceases, his most ardent desire is to be happy, and that the moment of his most profound regret is when he becomes convinced that on this earth perfect happiness cannot be found.

—Carl Hilty in Happiness: Essays on the Meaning of Life

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If we think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, we see that we are the earth; we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.

—Joseph Campbell

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True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message: "You must change your life.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

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In forming a bridge between body and mind, dreams may be used as a springboard from which man can leap to new realms of experience lying outside his normal state of consciousness and enlarge his vision not only of himself, but also of the universe in which he lives.

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