Top 250 David Brooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

60. “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

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

— David Brooks

62. “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

63. “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

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

— David Brooks

65. “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

66. “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

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

— David Brooks

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— David Brooks

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— David Brooks

94. “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

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

— David Brooks

96. “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

97. “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

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

— David Brooks

99. “When your institution is under threat, you feel you have a lot of hostility, you feel things are slipping away, you have got internal problems, there’s a tendency to turn inward and to focus on yourselves.”

— David Brooks

100. “The gun becomes this psychological totem, this thing of who I am. And it’s almost as if using the gun is going to be the thing that’s going to be my expression of how I make a difference in the world.”

— David Brooks