You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.
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...
As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.
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...
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...
(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.
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.
Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.
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...
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...
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.
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...
To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride. What is pride? These days the word pride has positive connotations. It means feeling good about yourself and the thin...
There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.
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...
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...
America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash of interests, but a clash of dreams.
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...
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