13 May 2013

From the Quote of the Week Files; May 13, 2013

Welcome Everybody to the Quote of the Week! We continue on with our Commencement Speech Wisdom series with a number of excerpts from Novelist David Foster's Speech to Kenyon College in 2005. 

His speech was eventually eventually adapted into a book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. Please note the link below to see an abridged version of the original audio recording of his speech set it to a series of images. Enjoy!
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"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

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"The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about."

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“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
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... simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College

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Wishing you a most beautiful day, wherever this may find you!

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