David Foster Wallace Quotes

I doubt about myself. I think doubts are good in life. The people who don't have doubts I think only two things-arrogance or not intelligence.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Doubt your doubts before you doubt your beliefs.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

If you think you're right 80% of the time, you're deluded.

I think it's very important to keep in the back of your mind: 'What if I'm wrong?'

The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility.

Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism.

The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life.

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

As a person... I'm a little more doubtful, introspective and analytical.

I'm not good at watching myself.

If I have learned one thing in life, it is never to take any man's own estimate of himself. He could very well be mistaken.

I'm not much of an analyzer or a psychologist.

I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

I thought I was so much smarter than everybody. And I'm not.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.

Doubt is crucial, I think, in every character I have ever played.

I question everything I do.

I have never been 100% confident that I am right about anything.