David Brooks Quotes & Sayings

Joy is not produced because others praise you. Joy emanates unbidden and unforced. Joy comes as a gift when you least expect it. At those fleeting moments you know why you were put here and what truth you serve. You may not feel giddy at those moments, you may not hear the orchestra's delirious swell or see flashes of crimson and gold, but you will feel a satisfaction, a silence, a peace - a hush. Those moments are the blessings and the signs of a beautiful life. — David Brooks

The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less. — David Brooks

I came to the conclusion is that we have a very shallow view of human nature in the policy world. We're really good at talking about material things, really bad at talking about emotions, really good at stuff we can count, really bad at the deeper stuff that actually drives behavior. — David Brooks

I take a benign view of digital connectedness. I notice in most young people's lives, Facebook and such doesn't replace normal dating or hanging out, it just facilitates it. — David Brooks

Economists sometimes do try to reduce behavior to law-like predictability. But people respond differently to different primes, to different contexts even from one moment to the next. We possess multiple selves that are aroused by different circumstances. — David Brooks

Live life as a series of revelations — David Brooks

The self-cultivator spends more energy trying to display the fact that he is happy - posting highlight reel Facebook photos and all the rest - than he does actually being happy. — David Brooks

People who succeed tend to find one goal in the distant future and then chase it through thick and thin. People who flit from one interest to another are much, much less likely to excel at any of them. School asks students to be good at a range of subjects, but life asks people to find one passion that they will follow forever. — David Brooks

I want to make big films. That's always been my ambition. — David Brooks

America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might. — David Brooks

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

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

It's worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero — David Brooks

The job of the wise person is to swallow the frustration and just go on setting an example of caring and digging and diligence in their own lives. What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is what gets transmitted. Never forget — David Brooks

I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?" — David Brooks

When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you love a person deeply, you want to serve them and earn their regard. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies. — David Brooks

He read vividly. — David Brooks

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. — David Brooks

I don't know if I'm sexist, though I have not paid much attention to the women's bracket. — David Brooks

Sin is the punishment of sin. — David Brooks

We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity. — David Brooks

If they would put love of truth above love of career. — David Brooks

We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can you explain the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year — David Brooks

We don't become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don't become what we know. Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love. — David Brooks

Bobos are uncomfortable with universal moral laws that purport to regulate pleasure. Bobos prefer more prosaic self-controlled regimes. The things that are forbidden are unhealthy or unsafe. The things that are encouraged are enriching or calorie burning. In other words, we regulate our carnal desires with health codes instead of moral codes. — David Brooks

We're not bad. But we are morally inarticulate. — David Brooks

It's just a lot safer to be an incumbent. So I think they have used the campaign finance reforms. They have passed laws that will help themselves stay in office. And I think that's one of the flaws that we do have in the system. — David Brooks

The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself, — David Brooks

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

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

Some children lack tools to see their course in the world in far-sighted ways. Just introducing school vouchers won't change that. You have to have nurse-home partnerships, early childhood education, mentoring programs and so on. People learn from people they love. — David Brooks

People tend to want to live up to their friends' high regard. — David Brooks

You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself. — David Brooks

People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles. — David Brooks

Empathy makes you more aware of other people's suffering, but it's not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action. — David Brooks

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self. — David Brooks

For example, the early Girl Scout handbooks preached an ethic of self-sacrifice and self-effacement. The chief obstacle to happiness, the handbook exhorted, comes from the overeager desire to have people think about you. — David Brooks

Stairway to Wisdom") David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: "Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union - to think as another thinks and feel as another feels. — David Brooks

The imagination offers up ideal visions of experiences which then leave us disappointed when the visions don't come true. — David Brooks

People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time. — David Brooks

No matter how hard we try to reduce everything to deterministic brain chemistry, no matter how hard we try to reduce behavior to the sort of herd instinct that is captured in big data, no matter how hard we strive to replace sin with nonmoral words, like "mistake" or "error" or "weakness," the most essential parts of life are matters of individual responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, — David Brooks

You should start your life with the illusion that you are completely in control of what you do. You should finish life with the recognition that, all in all, you got better than you deserved. — David Brooks

I wasn't born with a tie or with Mark Shields stapled to my left hip. I have another life. — David Brooks

We have the choice to choose how we're going to educate our emotions. — David Brooks

To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses. — David Brooks

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn't bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there's something wrong with them because they find war repugnant but also thrilling. They hate it and miss it.Many of their self-judgments go to extremes. A comrade died because he stepped on an improvised explosive device and his commander feels unrelenting guilt because he didn't go down a different street. Insurgents used women and children as shields, and soldiers and Marines feel a totalistic black stain on themselves because of an innocent child's face, killed in the firefight. The self-condemnation can be crippling.
The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015 — David Brooks

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart. — David Brooks

That is the job of the Catholic Church, to be a balance to the materialistic drives of our culture and of economy. — David Brooks

This starchy formality is not in vogue today. We carry ourselves in ways that are more natural and relaxed. We worry about appearing artificial. But those in Marshall's military world are more likely to believe that great individuals are made, not born, and that they are made through training. Change happens form the outside in. It is through the exercise of a drill that a person becomes self-regulating. It is through the expression of courtesy that a person becomes polite. It is through the resistance to fear that a person develops courage. It is through the control of facial expressions that one becomes sober. The act precedes the virtue. — David Brooks

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. — David Brooks

Cultivation of the hard skills, while failing to develop the moral and emotional faculties down below. Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses. On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own. We are good at talking about material incentives, but bad about talking about emotions and intuitions. We are good at teaching technical skills, but when it comes to the most important things, like character, we have almost nothing to say. — David Brooks

The people we admire the most are rooted in nature, but have surpassed nature. — David Brooks

In his book Human Universals, Donald E. Brown lists traits that people in all places share. The list goes on and on. All children fear strangers and prefer sugar solutions to plain water from birth. All humans enjoy stories, myths, and proverbs. In all societies men engage in more group violence and travel farther from home than women. In all societies, husbands are on average older than their wives. People everywhere rank one another according to prestige. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness. — David Brooks

The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything. — David Brooks

We don't have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences. — David Brooks

Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought. — David Brooks

People with character are capable of long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings through thick and thin. People with character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. — David Brooks

In this method, you don't ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do? In this scheme of things we don't create our lives; we are summoned by life. — David Brooks

What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker's cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz's moral purpose (building an integrated self). — David Brooks

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 degree. — David Brooks

Always take your job seriously, never yourself. — David Brooks

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year ... A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity. — David Brooks

Sin is also a necessary piece of our mental furniture because sin is communal, while error is individual. — David Brooks

I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do. — David Brooks

The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled. — David Brooks

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you? — David Brooks

I think there are two basic approaches you can use for campaign finance. One is complete openness, everybody knows absolutely everything, but no limits. But you let people decide.The other is just have a national public system. — David Brooks

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. — David Brooks

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

The gun becomes this psychological totem, this thing of who I am. And it's almost as if using the gun is going to be the thing that's going to be my expression of how I make a difference in the world. — David Brooks

I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush's administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs. — David Brooks

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

She was just too curious to stay in a self-imposed mental straight-jacket for very long. — David Brooks

tried to raise money for him, to enhance — David Brooks

The technology's going to change, but what people want to read is going to be basically the same. — David Brooks

If you grow up in a home where actions don't lead to predictable consequences, you don't develop strategies to control your impulses. — David Brooks

With the case of [Mike] Pence, giving a little aurora of likability to a candidate, a lead candidate who's a little lacking in that department. — David Brooks

The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance. We can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge. — David Brooks

Your DVD collection is organized, and so is your walk-in closet. Your car is clean and vacuumed, your frequently dialed numbers are programmed into your cordless phone, your telephone plan is suited to your needs, and your various gizmos interact without conflict. Your spouse is athletic, your kids are bright, your job is rewarding, your promotions are inevitable, everywhere you need to be comes with its own accessible parking. You look great in casual slacks. — David Brooks

The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction. — David Brooks

Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest. — David Brooks

Sometimes you don't even notice these people, because while they seem kind and cheerful, they are also reserved. They possess the self-effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don't need to prove anything to the world: humility, restraint, reticence, temperance, respect, and soft self-discipline. They radiate a sort of moral joy. They answer softly when challenged harshly. They are silent when unfairly abused. They are dignified when others try to humiliate them, restrained when others try to provoke them. But they get things done. They perform acts of sacrificial service with the same modest everyday spirit they would display if they were just getting the groceries. They are not thinking about what impressive work they are doing. They are not thinking about — David Brooks

The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small. — David Brooks

Some researchers used to believe that people had different learning styles - that some people are right brain and some are left brain; some are auditory and some are visual learners. There's almost no credible evidence to support this view. Instead, — David Brooks

I do think economic and social anxiety is the number one issue. And I'm pretty confident Hillary Clinton will be really riding that train pretty hard. — David Brooks

How can we expect young people to be rooted in things such as character, morality and honesty? How is one supposed to be at once an arrow soaring skyward and an oak planted firmly in the ground? The meritocratic culture hones strivers on every aspect of their lives save one - how to cultivate character. — David Brooks

Trying to mold one's life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it. — David Brooks

If you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. — David Brooks

If I had to fault President [Barack] Obama, I would say that sometimes governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization. — David Brooks

The ultimate joys are moral joys. — David Brooks

Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings, but when they do, soar out of sight. — David Brooks

The drugs are just growing all around the country, and so, it all feeds into problems that are not just urban, but are just spread throughout the country. — David Brooks

(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits. — David Brooks

Humanities are the instructors of enchantment. — David Brooks

People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time. — David Brooks

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don't come out healed; they come out different. — David Brooks

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 membership in a historic commitment. — David Brooks

Of the twenty- three men and women who served in Dwight Eisenhower's cabinets, only one, the secretary of agriculture, published a memoir afterward, and it was so discreet as to be soporific. — David Brooks

If there is a series of attacks like that or, God forbid, if ISIS is really sending soldiers across Europe and maybe across the world for a barrage of these things, then the political climate is revolutionized here. And maybe the [Donald] Trump speech will look like a precursor to a climate that we're all about to walk into. — David Brooks

We are all fundamentally equal souls, and if you make a zillion dollars, you're not any better than anybody else spiritually. You're still an equal soul. — David Brooks