Top 250 David Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We live in a culture of a big me. We’re encouraged – we raise our kids to think how great they are, where we have to market ourselves to get through life. We’re in social media, where we broadcast highlight – highlight reels of our own lives on Facebook.”

— David Brooks

52. “Thankfulness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, “is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.”

— David Brooks

53. “The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less.”

— David Brooks

54. “Joy is not produced because others praise you. Joy emanates unbidden and unforced. Joy comes as a gift when you least expect it. At those fleeting moments you know why you were put here and what truth you serve. You may not feel giddy at those moments, you may not hear the orchestra’s delirious swell or see flashes of crimson and gold, but you will feel a satisfaction, a silence, a peace – a hush. Those moments are the blessings and the signs of a beautiful life.”

— David Brooks

55. “But we often put our loves out of order. If someone tells you something in confidence and then you blab it as good gossip at a dinner party, you are putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. If you talk more at a meeting than you listen, you may be putting your ardor to outshine above learning.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

57. “Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.”

— David Brooks

58. “Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But.”

— David Brooks

59. “This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don’t want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.”

— David Brooks

60. “The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.”

— David Brooks

61. “The message of the summoned life is that you don’t need to panic if you don’t yet know what you want to do with your life. But you probably want to throw yourselves into circumstances where the summons will come.”

— David Brooks

62. “Happiness is not found in self contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.”

— David Brooks

63. “Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.”

— David Brooks

64. “The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That’s the natural genetic reaction.”

— David Brooks

65. “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

66. “Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half-truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

69. “We don’t have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences.”

— David Brooks

70. “We think we want ease and comfort, and of course we do from time to time, but there is something inside us that longs for some calling that requires dedication and sacrifice.”

— David Brooks

71. “The meritocracy defines “community” as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another.”

— David Brooks

72. “We live in a culture that teaches us to promote and advertise ourselves and to master the skills required for success, but that gives little encouragement to humility, sympathy, and honest self-confrontation, which are necessary for building character.”

— David Brooks

73. “Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

75. “What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.”

— David Brooks

76. “That person then, whoever it may be,” Cicero wrote in Tusculan Disputations, “whose mind is quiet through consistency and self-control, who finds contentment in himself, who neither breaks down in adversity nor crumbles in fright, nor burns with any thirsty need nor dissolves into wild and futile excitement, that person is the wise one we are seeking, and that person is happy.”

— David Brooks

77. “It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero.”

— David Brooks

78. “I think the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe. The emphasis on self – individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization – is a catastrophe.”

— David Brooks

79. “Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. 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

80. “We are smart because we are capable of fuzzy thinking.”

— David Brooks

81. “There are no free and democratic and wealthy countries in the world that have US rate of gun violence. We have to worry about loners and alienated people. We have to do better on mental health.”

— David Brooks

82. “Pain now is better than pain deferred.”

— David Brooks

83. “Baltasar Gracian’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a seventeenth-century guidebook by a Spanish Jesuit priest on how to retain one’s integrity while navigating the halls of power.”

— David Brooks

84. “Humility is awareness that you are an underdog in the struggle against your own weakness.”

— David Brooks

85. “I could tell you that 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

86. “Sometimes, you go – you achieve a few things in life. I have achieved more career success than I ever experienced or that I ever thought. And I just realized, it doesn’t make you happy. It’s an elemental truth. It’s so true.”

— David Brooks

87. “We shouldn’t just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.”

— David Brooks

88. “You should ask certain questions: What is the purpose of my life? What do I want from life? What are the things that I truly value, that are not done just to please or impress the people around me?”

— David Brooks

89. “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.”

— David Brooks

90. “It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

92. “Research by Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees that don’t win.”

— David Brooks

93. “I firmly determined that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory – that any pessimism and discouragement I might ever feel would be reserved for my pillow. To translate this conviction into tangible results, I adopted a policy of circulating through the whole force to the full limit imposed by physical considerations. I did my best to meet everyone from general to private with a smile, a pat on the back and a definite interest in his problems.17.”

— David Brooks

94. “To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.”

— David Brooks

95. “Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone.”

— David Brooks

96. “Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; “The night cometh.”

— David Brooks

97. “Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings, but when they do, soar out of sight.”

— David Brooks

98. “The secret of life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once said, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

— David Brooks

99. “I came to the conclusion is that we have a very shallow view of human nature in the policy world. We’re really good at talking about material things, really bad at talking about emotions, really good at stuff we can count, really bad at the deeper stuff that actually drives behavior.”

— David Brooks

100. “The hard part of intellectual life is separating what is true from what will get you liked.”

— David Brooks