David Brooks Quotes

I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.

~ David Brooks

Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today's world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act than the choice of an erotic partner.This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other's commitment.Today there are fewer norms that guide that way. Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.

~ David Brooks

Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure

~ David Brooks

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.On the other hand, they demand that the president 'take control.' They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change.

~ David Brooks

Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.

~ David Brooks

Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.

~ David Brooks

Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

Humanities are the instructors of enchantment.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college degree.

~ David Brooks

In 1950, the [Gallup organization] asked high school kids, are you a very important person? Then 12 percent said yes. Asked again in 2005, 80 percent said, yes, I'm a very important person.

~ David Brooks

When most people think about the future, they dream up ways that they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don't usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals that seem most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering.

~ David Brooks

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.

~ David Brooks

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 consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.

~ David Brooks

People with character are capable of long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings through thick and thin. People with character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.

~ David Brooks

To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.

~ David Brooks

You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed

~ David Brooks

there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their desires, more aware of their own weaknesses, more intent on combatting the flaws in their own natures and turning weakness into strength.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

Angela Duckworth has shown how important grit and perseverance are to lifetime outcomes. College students who report that they finish whatever they begin have higher grades than their peers, even ones with higher SATs.

~ David Brooks

Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

If colleges are going to justify themselves, they are going to have to thrive at those things that require physical proximity. That includes moral and spiritual development. Very few of us cultivate our souls as hermits. We do it through small groups and relationships and in social contexts.

~ David Brooks

Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.

~ David Brooks

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

~ David Brooks

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.

~ David Brooks