David Brooks Quotes

People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are ...

Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a c...

Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of...

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Irania...

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most p...

To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it i...

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his lang...

Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree....

In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:

Apparently, we have become such a hyper-individualized culture that it is impossible to develop an a...

When most people think about the future, they dream up ways that they might live happier lives. But ...

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyo...

Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the in...

In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a...

The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society f...

Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, a...

Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life out...

Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee....

there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ec...

Angela Duckworth has shown how important grit and perseverance are to lifetime outcomes. College stu...

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the pe...

It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.

I make honorable things pleasant to children." A teacher from Sparta

The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled...

You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the bes...

I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The in...

Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.

Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure

If colleges are going to justify themselves, they are going to have to thrive at those things that r...

Humanities are the instructors of enchantment.

I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose sel...

A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% ...

College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that the...

if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from...

People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard.

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shap...

Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for po...

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (st...

Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most di...

They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to pr...

People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we ar...

(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and...

In 1950, the [Gallup organization] asked high school kids, are you a very important person? Then 12 ...

[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the ...

There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to ...

Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; "The night cometh.

most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial no...

Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have ...

Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life fo...

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importa...

He read vividly.

Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their ...

you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrend...

Ehimlite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in d...

Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn ...

vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing...

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve se...

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

People with character are capable of long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to pe...

The inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.

They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.

wonderful people are made, not born – that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner vir...

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents do...

... there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven't lived up to their ...

We are called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma. Many of us don't kn...

What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of th...

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in...

This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic in...

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer fro...

This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbari...

I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.

...Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, in...

You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only wi...

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’...

Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them ...