479 Quotes by David Brooks

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.

The great works of art and literature have a lot to say on how to tackle the concrete challenges of living, like how to escape the chains of public opinion, how to cope with grief or how to build loving friendships. Instead of organizing classes around academic concepts — 19th-century French literature — more could be organized around the concrete challenges students will face in the first decade after graduation.

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

In childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid and fresh, and sometimes hits with terrifying force.

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

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.

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.

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.