Top 250 David Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.”

— David Brooks

152. “Epistemological modesty.”

— David Brooks

153. “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

154. “The school asks a person who has achieved a certain level of career success to give you a speech telling you that career success is not important.”

— David Brooks

155. “Harold had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.”

— David Brooks

156. “Trade agreements are a net benefit for the world, and a net benefit for our foreign policy, and in the long run, given the dislocations, are a net benefit for us, too.”

— David Brooks

157. “Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself.”

— David Brooks

158. “Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom – when it becomes an ultimate end – absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side – and fully commit to something.”

— David Brooks

159. “America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash of interests, but a clash of dreams.”

— David Brooks

160. “I wouldn’t say philosophy and theology are dead. Brain science doesn’t invent new philosophies but it helps remind us which of our existing philosophies are more true.”

— David Brooks

161. “Life is much bigger than we think, cause and effect intertwined in a vast moral structure that keeps pushing us to do better, become better, even when we dwell in the most painful confused darkness.”

— David Brooks

162. “We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.”

— David Brooks

163. “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

164. “I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.”

— David Brooks

165. “A dozen voices from across the institution told students that while those who lead flat and unremarkable lives may avoid struggle, a well-lived life involves throwing oneself into struggle, that large parts of the most worthy lives are spent upon the rack, testing moral courage and facing opposition and ridicule, and that those who pursue struggle end up being happier than those who pursue pleasure.”

— David Brooks

166. “A heroic moral victory for the New York Mets,. It may be the only kind of victory we’re achieving this season, but he set a good example for professional athletes and the rest of us.”

— David Brooks

167. “The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small.”

— David Brooks

168. “As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t.”

— David Brooks

169. “The less you agree with the policies of your superiors, the more energy you must direct to their accomplishment.”

— David Brooks

170. “Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.”

— David Brooks

171. “Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don’t see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that’s a great thing to build upon.”

— David Brooks

172. “I don’t think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.”

— David Brooks

173. “The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles.”

— David Brooks

174. “He subsumed his own desires for the sake of the group.”

— David Brooks

175. “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

176. “People who see themselves as the center of their solar system, often get enraptured by their own terrible but also delicious suffering. People who see themselves as a piece of a larger universe and a longer story rarely do.”

— David Brooks

177. “We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.”

— David Brooks

178. “The Germans have a word for this condition: Zerrissenheit – loosely, “falling-to-pieces-ness.” This is the loss of internal coherence that can come from living a multitasking, pulled-in-a-hundred-directions existence. 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

179. “We’re not bad. But we are morally inarticulate.”

— David Brooks

180. “That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount, and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experience did not correlate well with CEO success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and conscientiousness – being dependable, making plans, and following through.”

— David Brooks

181. “The joy, as C. S. Lewis put it, is not the satisfaction of the longing but the longing itself.”

— David Brooks

182. “We live in a culture that encourages us to be big about ourselves, and I think the starting point of trying to build inner goodness is to be a little bit smaller about yourself.”

— David Brooks

183. “When your institution is under assault, you’re feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don’t turn inward, go outward.”

— David Brooks

184. “What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is what gets transmitted.”

— David Brooks

185. “The more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them.”

— David Brooks

186. “If you live in a society like ours, in which people seldom object if they hear someone taking the Lord’s name in vain but are outraged if they see a pregnant woman smoking, then you are living in a world that values the worldly more than the divine.”

— David Brooks

187. “I’m thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.”

— David Brooks

188. “The great works of art and literature have a lot to say on how to tackle the concrete challenges of living, like how to escape the chains of public opinion, how to cope with grief or how to build loving friendships. Instead of organizing classes around academic concepts – 19th-century French literature – more could be organized around the concrete challenges students will face in the first decade after graduation.”

— David Brooks

189. “Emotion is the foundation of reason.”

— David Brooks

190. “This is the inverted logic of people who see around them a fallen world. The midcentury thinker most associated with this ironic logic is Reinhold Niebuhr. People like Randolph, Rustin, and King thought along Niebuhrian lines, and were influenced by him. Niebuhr argued that, beset by his own sinful nature, man is a problem to himself. Human actions take place in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension.”

— David Brooks

191. “Consider the possibility that a creature of infinite love has made a promise to us. Consider the possibility that we are the ones committed to, the objects of an infinite commitment, and that the commitment is to redeem us and bring us home.”

— David Brooks

192. “I’m not the most emotionally attuned guy in the world. My wife says that me writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony.”

— David Brooks

193. “Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives.”

— David Brooks

194. “It is possible to have a complex human relationship without words.”

— David Brooks

195. “One of the things capitalism does is, it does enhance and exacerbate the sin of pride, making yourself, the material world the center of your universe, instead of God’s will.”

— David Brooks

196. “The cognitive sciences have replaced literature as the way many people attempt to understand their own minds.”

— David Brooks

197. “The legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.”

— David Brooks

198. “The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.”

— David Brooks

199. “I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush’s administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs.”

— David Brooks

200. “When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.”

— David Brooks