“ The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest o… David Brooks
“ The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own. David Brooks
“ (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 through introspection, observation, connecting the… 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. T… David Brooks
“ You turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhe… David Brooks
“ Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America's inability to ta… David Brooks
“ College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few. 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… 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 habi… David Brooks
“ The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned. David Brooks
“ How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you? 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
“ 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 o… David Brooks
“ Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language. David Brooks
“ Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; "The night cometh. David Brooks
