Top 280 David Brooks Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic.”

— David Brooks

252. “There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there.”

— David Brooks

253. “Britain is blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.”

— David Brooks

254. “Since 2005, a majority of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, have said it was wrong and a mistake to go into Iraq.”

— David Brooks

255. “But they found that the traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytical thoroughness, and the ability to work long hours. That is to say, the ability to organize and execute.”

— David Brooks

256. “There are plenty of team players in government who do whatever the leader says. There are too few difficult members, who have complicated minds, unusual perspectives, the toughness to withstand the party-line barrages and a practical interest in producing results.”

— David Brooks

257. “Today, teachers tend to look for their students’ intellectual strengths, so they can cultivate them. But a century ago, professors tended to look for their students’ moral weaknesses, so they could correct them.”

— David Brooks

258. “New is America’s oldest tradition.”

— David Brooks

259. “You did it instead because you reordered your loves, and as Augustine says again and again, you become what you love.”

— David Brooks

260. “The drugs are just growing all around the country, and so, it all feeds into problems that are not just urban, but are just spread throughout the country.”

— David Brooks

261. “I think the presidency is a bad way to measure the effective campaign finance, because in the presidency, there is so much publicity, there’s so much money floating around.”

— David Brooks

262. “Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.”

— David Brooks

263. “Economists sometimes do try to reduce behavior to law-like predictability. But people respond differently to different primes, to different contexts even from one moment to the next. We possess multiple selves that are aroused by different circumstances.”

— David Brooks

264. “I want to try to make big films that hopefully connect with people.”

— David Brooks

265. “In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent.”

— David Brooks

266. “The job of the wise person is to swallow the frustration and just go on setting an example of caring and digging and diligence in their own lives. 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. Never forget.”

— David Brooks

267. “The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.”

— David Brooks

268. “Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.”

— David Brooks

269. “Perhaps to really know another person, you have to have a glimmer of how they experience the world. To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.”

— David Brooks

270. “Deciding whom to love is an inherently emotional business.”

— David Brooks

271. “This is what fools people,” the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once observed. “A man is always a teller of stories. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and tries to live his life as if he were recounting them.”

— David Brooks

272. “A biographer of the novelist E. M. Forster wrote, “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to be that guy.”

— David Brooks

273. “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.”

— David Brooks

274. “A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.”

— David Brooks

275. “Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”

— David Brooks

276. “The greatest thing a person does is to take the lessons of life, the hard knocks of life, the surprises of life, and the mundane realities of life and refine their own consciousness so that they can gradually come to see the world with more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity, and more grace.”

— David Brooks

277. “Our schools and other institutions have focused more and more on preparing people for their careers, but not on the skills of being considerate toward the person next to you. The humanities, which teach us what goes on in the minds of other people, have become marginalized.”

— David Brooks

278. “The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”

— David Brooks

279. “Tribalism is the dark twin of community.”

— David Brooks

280. “She who only looks inward will find only chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will find only flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can.”

— David Brooks

281. “Fewer people today see artists as oracles and novels as a form of revelation.”

— David Brooks

282. “A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached.”

— David Brooks

283. “Recently I was at a dinner with a political scientist who put down his fork and said to the four of us: “I’m eighty. What should I do with the rest of my life?” That was a really humble but big question to ask. Essentially, he was asking, “What is the best way to grow old?” We started talking about his values, the questions he wanted to ask in his future research, how anyone should spend the final years of their life. It was fantastic.”

— David Brooks

284. “When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.”

— David Brooks

285. “Even when you know someone well, I find that if you don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.”

— David Brooks

286. “On social media you can have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere.”

— David Brooks

287. “In his book Consolations, the essayist and poet David Whyte observed that the ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

— David Brooks

288. “A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can tell funny stories. That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist. A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can offer piercing insights on a range of topics. That’s a lecturer, but not a conversationalist. A good conversationalist is a master of fostering a two-way exchange. A good conversationalist is capable of leading people on a mutual expedition toward understanding.”

— David Brooks

289. “The most important part of your life is ahead of you, not behind you.”

— David Brooks