Quotes About Self-awareness

Le graduatorie servono a farvi capire a che punto siete, non chi siete. Memorizzate il vostro piazzamento mensile, poi dimenticatelo.

It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.

there was actually nothing, and /you/ were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn't function.

most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.

this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting.

Hal's brooding. Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X.

lo más peligroso que tiene la educación académica, por lo menos en mi caso, es que habilita mi tendencia a intelectualizar las cosas en exceso, a perderme en el pensamiento abstracto en lugar de limitarme a prestar atención a lo que está pasando delante de mí. Y en lugar de prestar atención a lo que está pasando dentro de mí.

when all the like props and stage-settings that let you just go around smugly assuming you're not a thing are ripped away and broken because all of a sudden now the world understands you as a thing, everybody else thinks you're a rat or a thing and now it's up to you, you're the only one that can decide if you're more.

La vostra preoccupazione per ciò che gli altri pensano di voi scompare una volta che capite quanto di rado pensano a voi.

David Foster Wallace

teach you how to accept your nonacceptance

wondered why the presence of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed.

David Foster Wallace

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.

Worship your intellect, being seing as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge og being found out. And so on.

Here is how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars' reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.

No, she simply felt - at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinctive intuitive moments - as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure.

what words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be? How was she to decide and describe—even to herself, looking inward and facing herself—what all she'd so painfully learned said about her?

What Mark Nechtr fears most: solipsistic solipsism: silence.

What put him there, here and now, for you to see, is that he can't be seen. That's what the whole thing's about, now. That no one is really the way they have to be seen.

Lo que intento decir es que pienso que esto forma parte de lo que se supone que significa en realidad ese mantra de que las humanidades «te enseñan a pensar»: ser un poco menos arrogante, tener cierta «conciencia crítica» de mí mismo y de mis certidumbres… porque un gran porcentaje de las cosas de las que suelo estar automáticamente seguro resultan ser completamente erróneas y fruto de engañarme a mí mismo.