David Foster Wallace

Need a whole new syntax for fatigue on days like this.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

I feel the presence of a higher power. I believe that what you give is what you get. It’s universal law. I believe in the power of prayer and of words. I’ve learned that when you predict that negative things will happen, they do.

[On religion:] Wasn’t it invented by man for a kind of solace? It’s as though he had said, ‘I’ll make me a nice comfortable garment to shut out the heat and the cold,’ and then it ends by becoming a strait-jacket.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.

I would like to believe there is a God, but I think it is better to say I’m not sure there is a God and live your life with kindness and respect for people than to say I know there is a God and then do bad things,

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.

To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both.

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.

The Christian ethic played an essential part in my upbringing.

I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. I got the idea from a book by Orlando Smith. Until I discovered this theory I was unsettled and dissatisfied-without a compass, so to speak. When I discovered reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan. I realized that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. There was time enough to plan and to create. I wouldn’t give five cents for seeing all the world, because I feel there is nothing in the five continents and on the five seas that I have not somehow seen. Somewhere is a master mind sending brain wave messages to us. There is a Great Spirit. I never did anything by my own volition. I was pushed by invisible forces within and without me. We inherit a native knowledge from a previous existence. Gospel of reincarnation is essence of all knowledge. I do not know where we come from or go to but we accumulate experience. Someday it will be possible to measure the soul. We all retain memories of past lives.

No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.

I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

I have a habit of running from the things I’ve prayed for and then asking God to send them again.