01UndatedThere are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.David Brooks / quote ↗
02UndatedFixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.David Brooks / quote ↗
03Undated(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.David Brooks / quote ↗
04UndatedThis cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. Many of us have instincts about right and wrong, about how goodness and character are built, but everything is fuzzy. Many of us have no clear idea how to build character, no rigorous way to think about such things. We are clear about external, professional things but unclear about internal, moral ones. What the Victorians were to sex, we are to morality: everything is covered in euphemism.David Brooks / quote ↗
05UndatedThe victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015David Brooks / quote ↗
06UndatedPeople generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015David Brooks / quote ↗
07UndatedDan 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.David Brooks / quote ↗
08UndatedWhat a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is what gets transmitted.David Brooks / quote ↗
09UndatedPeople with character are capable of long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings through thick and thin. People with character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.David Brooks / quote ↗
10UndatedTo nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.David Brooks / quote ↗
11UndatedYou can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed,David Brooks / quote ↗
12Undatedthere was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their desires, more aware of their own weaknesses, more intent on combatting the flaws in their own natures and turning weakness into strength.David Brooks / quote ↗
13UndatedThe inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.David Brooks / quote ↗
15UndatedAngela 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.David Brooks / quote ↗
16UndatedNearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.David Brooks / quote ↗
17UndatedAbilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.David Brooks / quote ↗
18UndatedHer 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.David Brooks / quote ↗
19UndatedThey possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to prove anything to the world:David Brooks / quote ↗
20UndatedPeople 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.David Brooks / quote ↗
22UndatedIt was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.David Brooks / quote ↗
23UndatedJust as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.David Brooks / quote ↗
24Undated... there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven't lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don't associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it's just that they are giving themselves a D- rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way.David Brooks / quote ↗
