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

What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz’s moral purpose (building an integrated self).

— David Brooks

When most people think about the future, they dream up ways that they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don't usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals that seem most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering.

— David Brooks

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

— David Brooks

Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.

— David Brooks

Wonderful people are made, not born – that the people I admired had achieved an unfaceable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

— David Brooks

You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed,

— David Brooks

You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.

— David Brooks

Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.

— David Brooks

You turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.

— David Brooks