"People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recog...












Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.
More David Brooks quotes
"Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.
"How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?
"You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.
"Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.
"wonderful people are made, not born – that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritua...
"The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.
"you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability...
"Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.
"People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard.
"[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.
"Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when t...
"Ehimlite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in developing their cognitive mission. But when it com...
"Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any cons...
"(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only ...