David Foster Wallace Quotes

People need meanings to everything. People want you to intellectualize every choice you make.

I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.

Listening to music for me is like homework. Music will give me enjoyment, but as soon as it's giving me that enjoyment, I want to analyse it, and then it becomes work. Why does it sound like that? How?... then I dissect it.

I'm big on watching film, and sometimes it hurts myself because I over-calculate things, or I overthink sometimes.

I'm the type of person, my mind is too strong; I think too hard.

I hate taxing my mind with analysis. I'm not a good analyst. I cannot talk about acting. I hate talking about it. I hate talking about analyzing.

People calculate too much and think too little.

I think intellectualization is what's killing most people.

If young gentlemen get from their years in college only manliness, esprit de corps, a release of their social gifts, a training ingive and take, a catholic taste in men and the standards of true sportsmen, they have gained much but they have not gained what a college should give them. It should give them insight into the things of the mind and the spiritthe consciousness of having taken on them the vows of true enlightenment and of having undergone the discipline, never to be shaken off, of those who seek wisdom in candor, with faithful labor and travail of spirit.

I'm contemplating thinking about thinking...but....it's overrated - just get another drink in!

My personal feeling is that people need to be careful not to start over-analyzing and taking things apart and trying to be critical.

Dwelling upon the self too much produces terrible fatigue. A man in that position is deaf and blind to everything else. The fatigue itself makes him cease to see the marvels all around.

He thinks things through too much.

The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

If knowledge is power and power is knowledge, then how so many idiots be graduating from college?

I had an occasional flash of understanding, but then got selfishly wrapped up again in my own problems and pleasures.

When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where ... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.

Do you always think this much? It's just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.

[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

I'm afraid I tend to be thinking about things and not paying sufficient attention to one's posture, deportment and general cast of face.

What are you thinking? Nothing. I mean...a lot of things. Kind of all at once.

My sense from talking to college students is that you have a healthier sense of the diversity of opinions or arguments or analysis about issues. In our day it was just sort of, "Well gee, this is what the news says so that's the way it is." It didn't really get challenged that much.

I was frequently told at drama school that I was thinking too much.