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 recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be wo...
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.
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.
[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.
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.
Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.
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.
Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.
I make honorable things pleasant to children." A teacher from Sparta
The moderate can only hope to be disciplined enough to combine in one soul, as Max Weber put it, both warm passion and a cool sense of proportion.
This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. Many of us have instincts about right and wrong, ab...
How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?
Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.
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...
Evan Thomas writes that Ike told his grandson, David, that that smile came not from some sunny feel-good philosophy but from getting knocked down by a boxing coach at West Point. ‘If you can’t smile w...
They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.
The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.
The problem, Augustine came to believe, is that if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own...
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...
This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions...
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