It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.
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...
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.
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.
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...
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 deg...
In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:
if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.
[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.
He read vividly.
I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.
most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.
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.
Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.
Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.
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 compe...
Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.
vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing yourself into a historical process. They involve compensating for the brevity of life by finding me...
Apparently, we have become such a hyper-individualized culture that it is impossible to develop an argument based on how individual cases fit into the fabric of the common good.