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

David Brooks Quotes

If you can create a social movement that people want to join, they will bend their energies and ideas to you.

— David Brooks

I think the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe. The emphasis on self – individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization – is a catastrophe.

— David Brooks

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

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

To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.

— David Brooks

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

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

Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

— David Brooks

It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.

— David Brooks

People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.

— David Brooks

Deciding whom to love is an inherently emotional business.

— David Brooks

Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; “The night cometh.

— David Brooks

The sentence ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ has caused more suffering, torture, and death than probably any other sentence ever framed.

— David Marshall Brooks

Religious philosophy is slave philosophy.

— David Marshall Brooks

The righting of the wrongs imposed on womankind therefore had been started not only without the aid of the churches but in face of their determined opposition.

— David Marshall Brooks

A secular morality teaches that what man thinks, says, and does lives after him and influences for good or ill future generations. This is a higher, nobler, and greater, incentive to righteousness than any life of personal reward or fear of punishment in a future life.

— David Marshall Brooks

Religion arose as a means of explanation of natural phenomena at a time when no other explanation of the origin of natural phenomena had been ascertained. God is always what Spinoza called it, “the asylum of ignorance.” When causes are unknown, God is brought forward; when causes are known, God retires into the background. In an age of ignorance, God is active; in an age of science, he is impotent.

— David Marshall Brooks

During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” The psychological, social, and moral toll caused by this detachment is horrific.

— David Brooks

All real work requires a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill.

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks
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