David Foster Wallace Quotes

I don't feel stupid, just inadequate. After three years of studying the law, I'm very much aware of how little I know.

This is an awesome time to be a knowledge seeker, no better time, but it's also the best time in history to be a complete idiot.

The frontiers of knowledge in the various fields of our subject are expanding at such a rate that, work as hard as one can, one finds oneself further and further away from an understanding of the whole.

Don't you find that the more you know, the more you don't know and can't ever learn because there's too much stuff out there?

Unless you know a lot more about something than I do, I am not really that interested. I have too much information already.

The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

I'm slow to pick things up. Everybody always seems to know more than I do.

Every year, it takes more brains to navigate this complicated world. More people are falling below what I call the 'incompetence line' through no fault of their own.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.

Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

We know lots of things we didn't use to know but we don't know any way to prevent 'em from happening.

Every time I've learned something, I've realized there are a hundred more things I don't know about the thing I just learned.

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

Uneducated people are unfortunate in that they do grasp complex issues, educated people, on the other hand, often do not understand simplicity, which is a far greater misfortune.

Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything - all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it. Is there time?

There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about.

I remembered a time when my grandmother had asked me to explain television to her - the guts, not the funny pictures. There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man's opinion is as good as another's. But there it is. As Star says, the world is what it is - and doesn't forgive ignorance.

It is not possible to know what you need to learn.

I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.

How it is we have so much information, but know so little?

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.