Quotes from David Brooks

He read vividly.

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.

His moral task was to suffer well, to be worthy of his sufferings. He could not control how much he suffered, but he could control his inner response to his sufferings.

The first big thing suffering does is it drags you deeper into yourself.

People who endure suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be.

She was artificially narrowing herself, amputating every humane and tender piece that didn't fit into a rigid frame.

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.

Abraham Lincoln suffered through depression through his life and then suffered through the pain of conducting a civil war, and emerged with the sense that Providence had taken control of his life, that he was a small instrument in a transcendent task.

Flourishing depends on unconscious skills that serve as a pre-requisite for conscious accomplishments.

Marshall McLuhan was harsh but not wrong when he observed, "Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." Recommitment often means putting your own sins on the table. Forbearance means acknowledging the wrongs that have been committed, and even the anger that they have created, but it puts

Companionate love is the calmer state that comes after, filled more with quiet satisfaction, friendship, and a gentler happiness

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

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.

The students would burn out if forced to spend their entire day amidst the social intensity of the cafeteria and hallway. Fortunately the school authorities also schedule dormant periods, called classes, during which the students can rest their minds and take a break from the pressures of social categorization. Students correctly understand, though adults appear not to, that socialization is the most intellectually demanding and morally important thing they will do in high school.

The only thing that remained distinct about Grace, through it all, was his equipoise. He never lost his cool. He never snapped at his aides. He never panicked. He'd always been the coolest person in any room, and drew people to him by force of his coolness, and that never changed.

People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away - ethnic, neighborhood, religious, communal and familial. This is asking more from politics than politics can deliver. Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor.

I figure that unless you are in the business of politics, covering it or columnizing about it, politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen's mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun. I wish our talk-show culture reflected that balance, and that the emotional register around politics were more in keeping with its low but steady nature.

Then, from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history.

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

Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits.

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.

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

We sometimes think of saint, or of people who are living like saints, as being ethereal, living in a higher spiritual realm. But of ten enough they live in an even less ethereal way than the rest of us. They are more fully of this earth, more fully engaged in the dirty, practical problems of the people around them.

Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness.