Top 250 David Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.”

— David Brooks

2. “Freedom without structure is its own slavery.”

— David Brooks

3. “Some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself. Some people think it’s not thinking about yourself. But, to me, the best definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance, seeing themselves from a distance and saying, what’s my problem?”

— David Brooks

4. “Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.”

— David Brooks

5. “Change your behavior and eventually you rewire your brain.”

— David Brooks

6. “The people who really have character make deep, unshakable connections to something outside themselves.”

— David Brooks

7. “The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, ‘The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.’”

— David Brooks

8. “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.”

— David Brooks

9. “You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.”

— David Brooks

10. “In my view, success is earned externally by being better than other people. But character, that sort of unfakeable goodness, is earned by being better than you used to be. And it’s about self-confrontation.”

— David Brooks

11. “We are all fundamentally equal souls, and if you make a zillion dollars, you’re not any better than anybody else spiritually. You’re still an equal soul.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

13. “Our society suffers from a crisis of connection, a crisis of solidarity. We live in a culture of hyper-individualism. There is always a tension between self and society, between the individual and the group. Over the past sixty years we have swung too far toward the self. The only way out is to rebalance, to build a culture that steers people toward relation, community, and commitment – the things we most deeply yearn for, yet undermine with our hyper-individualistic way of life.”

— David Brooks

14. “The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born.”

— David Brooks

15. “The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.”

— David Brooks

16. “I take a benign view of digital connectedness. I notice in most young people’s lives, Facebook and such doesn’t replace normal dating or hanging out, it just facilitates it.”

— David Brooks

17. “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

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

— David Brooks

19. “Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.”

— David Brooks

20. “People 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.”

— David Brooks

21. “Individualism says, You have to love yourself first before you can love others. But the second-mountain ethos says, You have to be loved first so you can understand love, and you have to see yourself actively loving others so that you know you are worthy of love. On the first mountain, a person makes individual choices and keeps their options open. The second mountain is a vale of promise making. It is about making commitments, tying oneself down, and giving oneself away.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

23. “To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.”

— David Brooks

24. “Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland.”

— David Brooks

25. “The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.”

— David Brooks

26. “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

28. “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.”

— David Brooks

29. “I am not a Jew for Jesus but I am definitely a Jew for Christmas. Christmas is one of the best things you Christians have given us, along with mac and cheese, Bono, croquet and politeness.”

— David Brooks

30. “Humility is freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time, but egotism is a ravenous hunger in a small space – self-concerned, competitive, and distinction-hungry. Humility is infused with lovely emotions like admiration, companionship, and gratitude. “Thankfulness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, “is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.”9.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

32. “The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.”

— David Brooks

33. “Since self-control is a muscle that tires easily, it is much better to avoid temptation in the first place rather than try to resist it once it arises.”

— David Brooks

34. “People become solid, stable, and worthy of self-respect because they have defeated or at least struggled with their own demons. If you take away the concept of sin, then you take away the thing the good person struggles against.”

— David Brooks

35. “The rich don’t exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.”

— David Brooks

36. “A person does not choose a vocation. A vocation is a calling.”

— David Brooks

37. “Some children lack tools to see their course in the world in far-sighted ways. Just introducing school vouchers won’t change that. You have to have nurse-home partnerships, early childhood education, mentoring programs and so on. People learn from people they love.”

— David Brooks

38. “All real work requires a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill.”

— David Brooks

39. “Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.”

— David Brooks

40. “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.”

— David Brooks

41. “Self-respect is produced by inner triumphs, not external ones.”

— David Brooks

42. “Bragging about what a good deal you got is one of the many great art forms that my people, the Jews, have introduced to American culture.”

— David Brooks

43. “I do think trying to live each day as a bunch of moral occasions, did I live up to what I would hope, and, if I didn’t, what can I do tomorrow to be a little better, I do think we can improve. We get better at life as we get older.”

— David Brooks

44. “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.”

— David Brooks

45. “To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.”

— David Brooks

46. “The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice.”

— David Brooks

47. “Live life as a series of revelations.”

— David Brooks

48. “It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.”

— David Brooks

49. “Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure.”

— David Brooks

50. “A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.”

— David Brooks