Quotes from Arthur C. Brooks

Resolve to pay attention to ideas, not just politics.

Success, the fruit of excellence, becomes an addiction. All because of pride. A cousin of pride is fear.

But the deeper point of the wisdom is not to make it to one hundred and break life into equal parts; it is to spend significant time in each distinct stage.

James Madison, in the fourteenth Federalist Paper, warned that the "most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rendering us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties and promote our happiness.

For my money, that distinction, hands down, goes to Saul of Tarsus—later Saint Paul, to Christians. Even if you aren't a Christian, hear me out: He was the first-century convert to the teachings of Christ who organized the work of a messianic itinerant preacher into a body of coherent theology and spread it around the ancient world.

Fear animates all success addicts. As philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Confessions, "I was not afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace; and that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything else in the world."[26] Can you relate to this?

The age-related decline among air-traffic controllers is so sharp—and the consequences of decline-related errors so dire—that the mandatory retirement age is fifty-six.

John Adams believed that the cancer of faction in America was to be "dreaded as the greatest political Evil, under our Constitution.

In his farewell address, George Washington famously warned against "the baneful effects" of political enmity.41

These are practical reasons to avoid them, but there's the moral reason, too: they're just plain wrong. We simply should not put up with insults, whether from the other side or our own. Indeed, I'll take it a step further. When someone on your side insults people on the other side, it is your responsibility to take it personally and stand up for those with whom you disagree.

What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn't just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers.

You know what our world needs: more love, less contempt.

Rule 3. Never assume the motives of another person.

Great gifts and achievements early in life are simply not an insurance policy against suffering later on. On the contrary, studies show that people who have chased power and achievement in their professional lives tend to be unhappier after retirement than people who did not.

Over the next several days, the truth emerged to Siddhartha—that release from suffering comes not from renunciation of the things of the world, but from release from attachment to those things.

A Middle Way shunned both ascetic extremism and sensuous indulgence, because both are attachments and thus lead to dissatisfaction. At the moment of this realization, Siddhartha became the Buddha.

Stein's law," named after the famous economist Herbert Stein from the 1970s: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

John Adams's maxim: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."1

Love and friendships are enormously time-consuming, it's true. They crowd out all kinds of other things, like . . . well, let's be honest: for many readers of this book, they mostly crowd out work. If that's the case for you, and it's what is holding back the proper development of romance, parenting, and real friendships, you have your priorities unbalanced.

Only a shift to intrinsic goals will give you what you really want, and prepare you to get on the second curve, which requires relationships and sharing wisdom in the spirit of love.

Conquer anger through gentleness, unkindness through kindness, greed through generosity, and falsehood by truth.

To adopt parts of life that will make you happy, even if they don't make you special.

The only solution to this problem is to shed my attachments and redefine my desires. To do so is my path to enlightenment—and my second curve.

On reflection, I realized that I am the angry one, the ill-tempered one, the miser, and the liar. My job is to conquer me. My tool for doing so is to show warm-heartedness to others, especially when they are not showing it to me. Your opportunity when treated with contempt is to change at least one heart—yours.