David Brooks Quotes

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.

The people who really have character make deep, unshakable connections to something outside themselves.

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

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.

In my view, success is earned externally by being better than other people. But character, that sort of unfakeable goodness, is earned by being better than you used to be. And it's about self-confrontation.

The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it's to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.

Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.

People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic.

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.

I've come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.

Pain now is better than pain deferred.

The Republican Party has become an ethnic nationalist party.

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.

Live life as a series of revelations

It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

Woe to you who insults the intelligence community, if you're president.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

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.

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.

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

I could tell you that when you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you'll settle it by flipping a coin. But don't go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails?

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

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

The message of the summoned life is that you don't need to panic if you don't yet know what you want to do with your life. But you probably want to throw yourselves into circumstances where the summons will come.