Cosmos Quote by David Foster Wallace

“This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.”

David Foster Wallace

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.8 out of 5 (6 ratings)

Cosmos Worship

More by David Foster Wallace

“I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.”

David Foster Wallace

Image

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only…

David Foster Wallace

“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.”

David Foster Wallace

Image

Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape…

David Foster Wallace

Image

“The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not,…

David Foster Wallace

Image

“I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been ... overlooked ; and then that horrific interval between…

David Foster Wallace

“He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic…

David Foster Wallace

Image

“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic…

David Foster Wallace

“If you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is…

David Foster Wallace

“Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?”

David Foster Wallace

Image

“She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether…

David Foster Wallace

Image

To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you…

David Foster Wallace

Image

Explore all 999 David Foster Wallace quotes

More Cosmos quotes

Mankind have been slow to believe that order reigns in the universe-that the world is a cosmos and a chaos.

James A. Garfield

Image

... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of…

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Image

“The necessity of nothingness does not create anything. The real value and meaning of the Being are not in its necessity but in its very existence. If it did not exist, necessity would neither help nor create it. If the Being exists, and it does, it is pointless and redundant to insist on its necessity. The necessity of itself, without…

Dejan Stojanovic

The entire cosmos is one vast burning bush, permeated by the fire of the divine power and glory

Kallistos Ware

Image

If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds. But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in…

Robert Grudin

I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end…

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Image

“When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of…

Vasily Grossman

As George Bernard Shaw observed: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." Yet I have to say, the idea that there is intelligent life elsewhere…

Neale Donald Walsch

Image

If the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Image

Finally, if life happened by chance on this earth and evolved upward, then it could seemingly happen elsewhere in the universe. But if, as we believe, human life resulted from a purposeful act of God, and if sin is inevitable for such beings, and if the human soul is the prize for which Satan and God do battle, then it…

Dave Hunt