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David Brooks Quotes

Total quotes: 18
“Moderation is not an ideology; it’s a way of coping with the complexity of the world.”
— David Brooks, Opinion | What Moderates Believe
Tagged: In Praise of Moderation, Against Extremism, US Politics, Immigration
“When you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you’ll settle it by flipping a coin. But don’t go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails?”
— David Brooks, Commencement Address at Rice University, 2011
Tagged: Graduation, Speech, Commencement, Advice, Good Advice, Widsom
“Love is the strongest kind of army because it generates no resistance.”
— David Brooks, The Road to Character
Tagged: Philosophy, character, Thinking, Thought
“Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.”
— David Brooks, Opinion | Lost in the Crowd
Tagged: Succes, Growth
“Tragedy and suffering have pushed people together in a way that goes deeper than just a convenient living arrangement.”
— David Brooks, The Atlantic, The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
Tagged: Family, gender roles, nuclear family
“This scale of purpose is not for everyone, but there is something beautiful and concrete and well-proportioned about tending that size of a garden.”
— David Brooks, The Small, Happy Life
Tagged: Happiness, Life, Small Happy Life, Small Things
“The central fallacy in modern life is that accomplishments can produce deep satisfaction. That's false.”
— David Brooks, The Road to Character
Tagged: How To Think, Philosophy, Advice, Success, Thinking
“Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning.”
— David Brooks, The Road to Character
Tagged: character, Principle, Philosophy, Thinking, Thought, self, Self-Discipline
“Create an entourage of heroes. Put their pictures on your wall, and keep them in your mind.”
— David Brooks, Commencement Address at Wake Forest University, 2007
Tagged: Commencement, Graduation, Speech
“Moderation requires courage. Moderates don’t operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons. They are unafraid to face the cross currents, detached from clan, acknowledging how little they know.”
— David Brooks, Opinion | What Moderates Believe
Tagged: US Politics, Immigration
“I expected most contributors would follow the commencement-speech clichés of our high-achieving culture: dream big; set ambitious goals; try to change the world. In fact, a surprising number of people found their purpose by going the other way, by pursuing the small, happy life.”
— David Brooks, Opinion | The Small, Happy Life
Tagged: How To Think, Philosophy, Minimalism, Small Life, Joy
“Terence J. Tollaksen wrote that his purpose became clearer once he began to recognize the decision trap: an amazingly consistent phenomena whereby ‘big’ decisions turn out to have much less impact on a life as a whole than the myriad of small seemingly insignificant ones.”
— David Brooks, Opinion | The Small, Happy Life
Tagged: How To Think, Philosophy, Small Life, Humility, Ambition, Decision Trap
“Souls are not saved in bundles. Love is the necessary force.”
— David Brooks, The Power of a Dinner Table
Tagged: Love, Why we believe what we believe
“We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love.”
— David Brooks, The Road to Character
Tagged: character, Love, Becoming, The Person You'll Become
“Truth before justice. All political movements must face inconvenient facts — thoughts and data that seem to aid their foes. If you try to suppress those facts, by banning a speaker or firing an employee, then you are putting the goals of your cause, no matter how noble, above the search for truth. This is the path to fanaticism, and it always backfires in the end.”
— David Brooks, Opinion | What Moderates Believe
Tagged: US Politics, Immigration
“The sensitive person understands that each person's ordeal is unique and should not be compared to anyone else's. Next, they do the practical things: making lunch, dusting the room, washing the towels. They don't try to minimize what is going on. They don't attempt to reassure with false, saccharine sentiments. They don't say that the pain is all for the best. They don't search for silver linings. They do what wise souls do in the presence of tragedy and trauma. They practice a passive activism. They don't bustle about trying to solve something that cannot be solved. The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct.”
— David Brooks, The Road to Character
Tagged: How To Think, Philosophy, character, Thought Leading
“Self-respect is not the same as self-confidence or self-esteem. Self-respect is not based on IQ or any of the mental or physical gifts that help get you into a competitive college. It is not comparative. It is not earned by being better than other people at something. It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation. It emerges in one who is morally dependable. Self-respect is produced by inner triumphs, not external ones.”
— David Brooks, The Road to Character
Tagged: Philosophy, How To Think, character, Self-Development
“If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.”
— David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
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