David Foster Wallace:

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. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

William Deresiewicz:

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it's almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it's even there.

One young fish to another:

What the hell is water?

David Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Decius:

It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Ashby Jones:

Happiness exists just around the corner, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

Curtis White:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called "the visible God": money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Pico Iyer:

I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Jack Handey:

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Thirty years ago, when I was still a novice at Tu Hieu Pagoda, washing the dishes was hardly a pleasant task. During the Season of Retreat when all the monks returned to the monastery, two novices had to do all the cooking and wash the dishes for sometimes well over one hundred monks. There as no soap. We had only ashes, rice husks, and coconut husks, and that was all. Cleaning such a high stack of bowl was a chore, especially during the winter when the water was freezing cold. Then you had to heat up a big pot of water before you could do any scrubbing. Nowadays one stands in a kitchen equipped with liquid soap, special scrubpads, and even running hot water which makes it all the more agreeable now. Anyone can wash them in a hurry, then sit down and enjoy a cup of tea afterwards. I can see a machine for washing clothes, although I wash my own things out by hand, but a dishwashing machine is going just a little too far!

While washing the dishes one should only be washing dishes, which mean that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bows is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There is no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.

If while washing the dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future – and we are incapable of actually living in a minute of life.

David Foster Wallace:

It is about simple awareness -- 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: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

As an addendum, I feel that Wallace was stabbing at something the Buddists have understood for centuries, but he never quite got there.

If you've got the right perspective on things, the fact that you can wash dishes is totally amazing. The universe is filled with inhospitable worlds - dead planets. The Moon has radical temperature ranges through out the day and is covered with jagged microscopic dust. Mars has an atmosphere but no electromagnetic field to shield the planet from the Sun's radiation. Jupiter is a ball of gas. Thats how most of the universe is. Totally hostile.

The fact that you exist on THIS planet and you can stand in line at a grocery store is amazing. A fucking grocery store! Imagine how many things had to line up through out history in order to create that grocery store for you. Contemplate the sheer complexity that caused all of the products there to be invented and to be assembled and delivered and organized and all the people that contributed through out time to that process and all of the things that influenced those people and how improbable it all is that you should exist at this time and in this place and you should be able to stand in that line.

An enlightened person can stand in line in a grocery store and be in total amazement of that fact and soak it all in and not get bored, and it is in the soaking it all in that greatly pleasurable experiences happen.

Its all just a matter of seeing things for what they really are.