Top 100 David Brooks Quotes
#1. She was carried along by events, not reflecting on them, just letting them sweep over her.
David Brooks
#2. aridity of her own marriage at that point or her profound
David Brooks
#3. If the article mentions some celebrity-perhaps a recently dead politician-the author will want to mention some pointless detail from her last meeting with that person or the emotions she experienced when learning of the subject's death.
David Brooks
#4. 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.
David Brooks
#5. They turn nature into an achievement course, a series of ordeals and obstacles they can conquer. They go into nature to behave unnaturally. In nature animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort. But Bobo naturalists flee comfort and seek cold and deprivation.
David Brooks
#6. The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction.
David Brooks
#7. Sometimes, you go - you achieve a few things in life. I have achieved more career success than I ever experienced or that I ever thought. And I just realized, it doesn't make you happy. It's an elemental truth. It's so true.
David Brooks
#8. Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three, or four
David Brooks
#9. There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.
David Brooks
#10. When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.
David Brooks
#11. The imagination offers up ideal visions of experiences which then leave us disappointed when the visions don't come true.
David Brooks
#12. Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure
David Brooks
#13. Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness.
David Brooks
#14. Always take your job seriously, never yourself.
David Brooks
#15. 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
#16. Take a bucket, fill it with water, Put your hand in - clear up to the wrist. Now pull it out; the hole that remains Is a measure of how much you'll be missed ... . The moral of this quaint example: To do just the best that you can, Be proud of yourself, but remember, There is no Indispensible Man!24
David Brooks
#17. I want to try to make big films that hopefully connect with people.
David Brooks
#18. 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
#19. Britain is blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.
David Brooks
#20. 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
#21. Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.
David Brooks
#22. I was really fortunate that I went to a high school where we actually had a film theory program.
David Brooks
#23. I make honorable things pleasant to children. A teacher from Sparta
David Brooks
#24. 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
#25. Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks ... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.
David Brooks
#26. In the educated class even social life is a series of aptitude tests; we all must perpetually perform in accordance with the shifting norms of propriety, ever advancing signals of cultivation.
David Brooks
#27. 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.
David Brooks
#28. You can't build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed,
David Brooks
#29. 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.
David Brooks
#30. Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives.
David Brooks
#32. It's a completely irrational decision to drop out of school.
David Brooks
#33. I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.
David Brooks
#34. In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:
David Brooks
#35. When you're running for president you have to take some risks and you've got to show people something fresh and you've got to stay interesting.
David Brooks
#37. How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?
David Brooks
#38. 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
#39. I'm a pundit. I'm, like, paid to be a narcissistic blowhard and be in front of the camera.
David Brooks
#40. Most people don't form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.
David Brooks
#41. [T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.
David Brooks
#42. Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive.
David Brooks
#43. Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; The night cometh.
David Brooks
#45. Some sins, such as anger and lust, are like wild beasts. They have to be fought through habits of restraint.
David Brooks
#46. I think the Republican budget priorities are messed up. I salute for the way they're attacking some of the entitlement programs, but they are taking huge cuts, by pretending they're just block-granting it to the states, out of Medicaid, from the least fortunate.
David Brooks
#47. 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
#48. To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
David Brooks
#49. If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.
David Brooks
#50. Pride blinds us to the reality of our divided nature.
David Brooks
#51. Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.
David Brooks
#52. If I had to fault President [Barack] Obama, I would say that sometimes governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.
David Brooks
#53. Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascinating figure.We say Nixonian about a lot of people. He really is Nixonian. He's brilliant. He's very isolated and insular.
David Brooks
#55. Since 2005, a majority of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, have said it was wrong and a mistake to go into Iraq.
David Brooks
#56. 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.
David Brooks
#57. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there
David Brooks
#58. We live in a culture of a big me. We're encouraged - we raise our kids to think how great they are, where we have to market ourselves to get through life. We're in social media, where we broadcast highlight - highlight reels of our own lives on Facebook.
David Brooks
#59. 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.
David Brooks
#60. 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
#61. They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.
David Brooks
#62. 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
#63. People generally don't suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who've endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.
David Brooks
#64. I agree with the idea of cutting [budget], but it should all be coming out of entitlements for the affluent and not out of domestic discretionary, which is welfare, education, all the stuff the government does, parks, FBI, and it shouldn't be coming out of Medicaid.
David Brooks
#65. 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
#66. Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.
David Brooks
#67. Freedom without structure is its own slavery.
David Brooks
#68. Jim Stavridis is the former NATO commander who is sometimes on people's lists, also very plausible, self-possessed, someone with sobriety.
David Brooks
#69. As a director, I like trying to unlock the subtext of the scene and try to put the camera in a place that helps that.
David Brooks
#70. A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.
David Brooks
#71. 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
#72. I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.
David Brooks
#73. It's almost inherent, but I'm a massive [Stanley] Kubrick fan. I'm a big admirer of what guys like Christopher Nolan have been able to do. For me, to be able to try to make big films that reach a lot of people, and that hopefully have something to say, is a lofty goal, but that's my goal.
David Brooks
#74. You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.
David Brooks
#75. a statement by Bertrand Russell ... embodies the tone of heroic denunciation that you can muster only if you have drunk deeply from the cup of your own oracular majesty
David Brooks
#76. It's not that Egypt doesn't have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.
David Brooks
#77. 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
#78. For Augustine, that's the crucial change. Knowledge is not enough for tranquillity and goodness, because it doesn't contain the motivation to be good. Only love impels action. We don't become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves.
David Brooks
#79. You can't really know God if you ignore his laws, especially the ones that regulate the most intimate spheres of life. You may be responsible and healthy, but you will also be shallow and inconsequential.
David Brooks
#80. I want to limit the effects of the power of donors, no question about it.
David Brooks
#81. Putin's an egomaniac, so there are two ways he can process his ego mania. He can say, "Oh, I stood up to the U.S.," or, "Hey, I'm essential to the world order."
David Brooks
#82. 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.
David Brooks
#83. You are the spiritual entity that emerges out of the material networks in your head.
David Brooks
#84. 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
#85. Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.
David Brooks
#86. The incumbents just have a ton more money because they have rigged the system to help themselves, because they have these networks of small donors. Meanwhile, the amount of people, the incumbents being reelected has just been - that has been going up and up and up.
David Brooks
#88. The legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.
David Brooks
#89. I am not a Jew for Jesus but I am definitely a Jew for Christmas. Christmas is one of the best things you Christians have given us, along with mac and cheese, Bono, croquet and politeness.
David Brooks
#90. The three people who are most often talked about with Hillary Clinton, whether it's Tim Kaine or Vilsack or Cory Booker, they are three extremely nice people.
David Brooks
#91. 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.
David Brooks
#92. It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.
David Brooks
#93. Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon.
David Brooks
#94. Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don't come out healed; they come out different.
David Brooks
#95. In her memoirs she writes that she left the hospital job because it eventually made her numb to suffering, and it left her no time to write. She neglected
David Brooks
#96. The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.
David Brooks
#97. College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few.
David Brooks
#98. 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.
David Brooks
#99. The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.
David Brooks
#100. Sin is a necessary piece of our mental furniture because it reminds us that life is a moral affair.
David Brooks
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