Top 250 David Brooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I’m a pundit. I’m, like, paid to be a narcissistic blowhard and be in front of the camera.”

— David Brooks

102. “In this method, you don’t ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do? In this scheme of things we don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life.”

— David Brooks

103. “For example, the early Girl Scout handbooks preached an ethic of self-sacrifice and self-effacement. The chief obstacle to happiness, the handbook exhorted, comes from the overeager desire to have people think about you.”

— David Brooks

104. “The effectiveness of a group of people is not determined by their IQ but by how well they communicate.”

— David Brooks

105. “The median narcissism score has risen 30 percent in the last two decades. Ninety-three percent of young people score higher than the middle score just twenty years ago.4 The largest gains have been in the number of people who agree with the statements “I am an extraordinary person” and “I like to look at my body.”

— David Brooks

106. “Humility is a virtue of self-understanding in context, acquired by the practice of other centeredness.”

— David Brooks

107. “I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants-silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.”

— David Brooks

108. “Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.”

— David Brooks

109. “Helen Keller observed. “So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.”

— David Brooks

110. “Sin is also a necessary piece of our mental furniture because sin is communal, while error is individual.”

— David Brooks

111. “I’m not a kicker and a screamer.”

— David Brooks

112. “The self-effacing person is soothing and gracious, while the self-promoting person is fragile and jarring. 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.”

— David Brooks

113. “Joy tends to involve some transcendence of self. It’s when the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together. Joy is present when mother and baby are gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, when a hiker is overwhelmed by beauty in the woods and feels at one with nature, when a gaggle of friends are dancing deliriously in unison. Joy often involves self-forgetting.”

— David Brooks

114. “Love is the strongest kind of army because it generates no resistance.”

— David Brooks

115. “Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed, when we come into contact with people we admire and love and we consciously and unconsciously bend our lives to mimic theirs.”

— David Brooks

116. “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

117. “People tend to marry people with similar-width noses, eyes similarly apart, with complementary immune systems.”

— David Brooks

118. “Start your work from where you live, with the small concrete needs right around you. Help ease tension in your workplace. Help feed the person right in front of you. Personalism holds that we each have a deep personal obligation to live simply, to look after the needs of our brothers and sisters, and to share in the happiness and misery they are suffering.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

120. “It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.”

— David Brooks

121. “People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.”

— David Brooks

122. “Always take your job seriously, never yourself.”

— David Brooks

123. “When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you love a person deeply, you want to serve them and earn their regard. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies.”

— David Brooks

124. “Many observers have noticed that love eliminates the distinction between giving and receiving. Since the selves of the two lovers are intermingled, scrambled, and fused, it feels more delicious to give to the beloved than to receive.”

— David Brooks

125. “Montaigne’s example teaches that if you have realistically low expectations, you’ll end up pleased in most circumstances.”

— David Brooks

126. “If you grow up in a home where actions don’t lead to predictable consequences, you don’t develop strategies to control your impulses.”

— David Brooks

127. “I was really fortunate that I went to a high school where we actually had a film theory program.”

— David Brooks

128. “If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.”

— David Brooks

129. “I want to limit the effects of the power of donors, no question about it.”

— David Brooks

130. “The technology’s going to change, but what people want to read is going to be basically the same.”

— David Brooks

131. “This is what Kierkegaard called “the dizziness of freedom.” When the external constraints are loosened, when a person can do what he wants, when there are a thousand choices and distractions, then life can lose coherence and direction if there isn’t a strong internal structure.”

— David Brooks

132. “We really do have dappled souls.”

— David Brooks

133. “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

134. “The universe is alive and connected, these moments tell us. There are dimensions of existence you never could have imagined before. Quantum particles inexplicably flip together, even though they are separated by vast differences of time and space. Somehow the world is alive and communicating with itself. There is some interconnecting animating force, and we are awash in that force, which we with our paltry vocabulary call love. The.”

— David Brooks

135. “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

136. “That is the job of the Catholic Church, to be a balance to the materialistic drives of our culture and of economy.”

— David Brooks

137. “People in the valley have been broken open. They have been reminded that they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display.”

— David Brooks

138. “The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain.”

— David Brooks

139. “First, they had good character. They were energetic, honest, and dependable. They were persistent after setbacks and acknowledged their mistakes.”

— David Brooks

140. “Most poor people in America are white. The family breakdown issue is an issue that crosses all sorts of racial lines. High school dropout issues. But because of the flow of events which involve the racial component, we’ve sometimes confused racial issues with other issues which are trans-racial.”

— David Brooks

141. “Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views.”

— David Brooks

142. “Edmund Burke argued that people who have never looked backward to their ancestors will not be able to look forward and plan for the future. People who look backward to see the heroism and the struggle that came before see themselves as debtors who owe something, who have some obligation to pay it forward.”

— David Brooks

143. “Agency is not automatic. It has to be given birth to, with pushing and effort.”

— David Brooks

144. “I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.”

— David Brooks

145. “I think the Republican budget priorities are messed up. I salute for the way they’re attacking some of the entitlement programs, but they are taking huge cuts, by pretending they’re just block-granting it to the states, out of Medicaid, from the least fortunate.”

— David Brooks

146. “Today, the word “sin” has lost its power.”

— David Brooks

147. “I don’t know if I’m sexist, though I have not paid much attention to the women’s bracket.”

— David Brooks

148. “It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.”

— David Brooks

149. “Epistemological modesty.”

— David Brooks

150. “One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.”

— David Brooks