Quotes from David Brooks

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.

The Orchid and the Dandelion (La orquídea y el diente de león)

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.

Joy is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes.

he was asked to march to the front hall and retrieve his backpack. He did so with the energy of a convicted killer on his way to the execution chamber. Harold's backpack was an encyclopedia of boyhood interests and suggested that Harold was well on his way to a promising career as a homeless person. Inside, if one dug down through various geological layers, one could find old pretzels, juice boxes, toy cars, Pokemon cards, PSP games/.../The backpack weighed slightly less than a Volkswagen.

Angela Duckworth has shown how important grit and perseverance are to lifetime outcomes. College students who report that they finish whatever they begin have higher grades than their peers, even ones with higher SATs.

Poorer children grow up with more stress and more disruption, and these disadvantages produce effects on the brain. Researchers often use dull tests to see who can focus attention and stay on task. Children raised in the top income quintile were two-and-a-half times more likely to score well on these tests than students raised in the bottom quintile.

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.

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

without social trust, the political system devolves into a brutal shoving match

When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tires to banish words like "virtue", "character", "evil" and "vice altogether, that doesn't make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language.

In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:

When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tries to banish words like "virtue", "character", "evil" and "vice altogether, that doesn't make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language.

When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tries to banish words like "virtue", "character", "evil" and "vice" altogether, that doesn't make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language.

The inner struggle against one's own weaknesses is the central drama of life.

The parental relationship sits outside the the logic of meritocracy and is the closest humans come to grace.

Modern society has created a giant apparatus for the cultivation of the hard skills, while failing to develop the moral and emotional faculties down below. Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses. On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own.

that your are the prime driver of your life. The world is malleable enough to be shaped by you. To lead a better life you just have to work harder, or use more willpower, or make better decisions.

Your unconscious wants to entangle you in the thick web of relations that are the essence of human flourishing. It longs and pushes for love, for the kind of fusion Douglas and Carol Hofstadter shared. Of all the blessings that come with being alive, it is the most awesome gift.

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.

There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.

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.

you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.

One of the things capitalism does is, it does enhance and exacerbate the sin of pride, making yourself, the material world the center of your universe, instead of God's will.