David Brooks quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by David Brooks

David Brooks Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from David Brooks on Wise Famous Quotes.

If you're a soldier or marine in an Arab country, Islam is the solution. And you need to show respect.

I do think economic and social anxiety is the number one issue. And I'm pretty confident Hillary Clinton will be really riding that train pretty hard.

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.

Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives.

I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?"

It's a completely irrational decision to drop out of school.

[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.

The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction.

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.

Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.

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.

First, they had good character. They were energetic, honest, and dependable. They were persistent after setbacks and acknowledged their mistakes.

We're not bad. But we are morally inarticulate.

It's only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

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.

Fundamentalism is still on the march.

That is the job of the Catholic Church, to be a balance to the materialistic drives of our culture and of economy.

I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.

Live life as a series of revelations

We have the choice to choose how we're going to educate our emotions.

The ultimate joys are moral joys.

A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.

I don't know if I'm sexist, though I have not paid much attention to the women's bracket.

The imagination offers up ideal visions of experiences which then leave us disappointed when the visions don't come true.

The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small.

I'm not the most emotionally attuned guy in the world. My wife says that me writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony.

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

If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK.

I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.

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.

Love is the strongest kind of army because it generates no resistance.

I'm a pundit. I'm, like, paid to be a narcissistic blowhard and be in front of the camera.

Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.

It's not that Egypt doesn't have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.

People tend to marry people with similar-width noses, eyes similarly apart, with complementary immune systems.

President Obama was the first president not to abide by the limits in the general election.

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

People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.

I want to try to make big films that hopefully connect with people.

Trash talk ... Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.

The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself,

When your institution is under assault, you're feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don't turn inward, go outward.

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don't come out healed; they come out different.

You are the spiritual entity that emerges out of the material networks in your head.

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

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

Always take your job seriously, never yourself.

We really do have dappled souls.

Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks ... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

Humility is the awareness that there's a lot you don't know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.

She was carried along by events, not reflecting on them, just letting them sweep over her.

The legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.

College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few.

If I had to fault President [Barack] Obama, I would say that sometimes governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.

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

I want to limit the effects of the power of donors, no question about it.

Sin is the punishment of sin.

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

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

If you have realistically low expectations, you'll end up pleased in most circumstances.

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

The effectiveness of a group of people is not determined by their IQ but by how well they communicate.

The people we admire the most are rooted in nature, but have surpassed nature.

They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don't need to prove anything to the world:

The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.

Moderation is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there.

Sin is a necessary piece of our mental furniture because it reminds us that life is a moral affair.

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive.

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.

The brain writes the autobiography of our species at the conscious level.

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

Jim Stavridis is the former NATO commander who is sometimes on people's lists, also very plausible, self-possessed, someone with sobriety.

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.

Pride blinds us to the reality of our divided nature.

I make honorable things pleasant to children. A teacher from Sparta

Harrison had turned social awkwardness into a form of social power.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

aridity of her own marriage at that point or her profound

Trying to mold one's life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it.

We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.

People tend to want to live up to their friends' high regard.

I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.

If you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.

Since 2005, a majority of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, have said it was wrong and a mistake to go into Iraq.

If you know that most processing is below the level of awareness, you learn the value of sleep. You're brain is working on the problem anyway.

Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being.

I wasn't born with a tie or with Mark Shields stapled to my left hip. I have another life.

tried to raise money for him, to enhance

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.

If they would put love of truth above love of career.

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

Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.

I want to make big films. That's always been my ambition.

They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.

Agency is not automatic. It has to be given birth to, with pushing and effort.