DBDavid Brooks

80 collected words

David Brooks

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

02Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

03Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

04Undated

If colleges are going to justify themselves, they are going to have to thrive at those things that require physical proximity. That includes moral and spiritual development. Very few of us cultivate our souls as hermits. We do it through small groups and relationships and in social contexts.

David Brooks / quote

05Undated

Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.

David Brooks / quote

06Undated

You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.

David Brooks / quote

07Undated

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.

David Brooks / quote

08Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

09Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

10Undated

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.

David Brooks / quote

11Undated

wonderful people are made, not born – that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

David Brooks / quote

12Undated

People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.

David Brooks / quote

13Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

14Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

15Undated

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

David Brooks / quote

16Undated

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

David Brooks / quote

17Undated

Ehimlite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in developing their cognitive mission. But when it comes to the sort of growth Deresiewicz is talking about, everyone is on their own. An admissions officer might bias her criteria slightly away from the Résumé God and toward the quirky kid. A student may privately wrestle with taking a summer camp job instead of an emotionally vacuous but résumé-padding internship. But these struggles are informal, isolated and semi-articulate.

David Brooks / quote

18Undated

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

David Brooks / quote

19Undated

Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

David Brooks / quote

20Undated

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.

David Brooks / quote

21Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

22Undated

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

David Brooks / quote

23Undated

It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.

David Brooks / quote

24Undated

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.

David Brooks / quote