David Brooks Quotes

Possibly I am something like a ship which, buffeted and pounded by wind and wave, is still afloat and manages in spite of frequent tacks and turnings to stay generally along its plotted course and continues to make some, even if slow and painful, headway.”43

When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. The people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They are the ones who will seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish more.

We have the power to choose narratives in which we absolve ourselves of guilt and blame everything on conspiracies or others.

It’s not that worldly achievement and public acclaim are automatically bad, it’s just that they are won on a planet that is just a resting place for the soul and not our final destination. Success here, acquired badly, can make ultimate success less likely, and that ultimate success is not achieved through competition with others.

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’t bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there’s something wrong with them because they find war repugnant but also thrilling. They hate it and miss it.Many of their self-judgments go to extremes. A comrade died because he stepped on an improvised explosive device and his commander feels unrelenting guilt because he didn’t go down a different street. Insurgents used women and children as shields, and soldiers and Marines feel a totalistic black stain on themselves because of an innocent child’s face, killed in the firefight. The self-condemnation can be crippling.
The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

Change your behavior and eventually you rewire your brain.

We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love.

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

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone, which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well or badly (depending on their childhood). They lay down a foundation of stories in which goals are achieved, hurts healed, peace is restored, and the world is understood

Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.

Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” —

...Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them. You follow a set of rules, enshrined in a constitution or in custom, to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.

The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. Politics is a muddled activity in which people have to recognize restraints and settle for less than they want. Disappointment is normal.

But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way....

Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.

Character is the main object for education,

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