Quotes by David Brooks

Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.

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

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 habit, the particular reality of their town and family.

They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to prove anything to the world:

People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we are all built from “crooked timber”— from Immanuel Kant’s famous line, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.

It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.

if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.

In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:

A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.

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 our souls as hermits. We do it through small groups and relationships and in social contexts.

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 nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.

You cant counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.

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.

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

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 overwhelming and fulfilling yes.

wonderful people are made, not born – that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

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 won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.