David Brooks Quotes

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

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.

I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.

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...

Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave the...

Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and...

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...

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

Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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 w...

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...

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 n...