This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

by David Foster Wallace

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“These Eskimos might be much more than they seem.”