The Road to Character Quotes

“Montaigne once wrote, “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“When unattached to the right ends, communities can be more barbarous than individuals.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Evan Thomas writes that Ike told his grandson, David, that that smile “came not from some sunny feel-good philosophy but from getting knocked down by a boxing coach at West Point. ‘If you can’t smile when you get up from a knockdown,’ the coach said, ‘you’re never going to lick an opponent.’ ” 16 He thought it was necessary to project easy confidence in order to lead the army and win the war:”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“The push for worldly splendor and eternal glory are futile efforts by people who are seeking external means to achieve internal tranquillity and friendship with themselves”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“He was a fanatic about both preparation and then adaptation: “The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything,” he would say. Or, “Rely on planning, but never trust plans.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Johnson was a fervent dualist, believing that only tensions, paradoxes, and ironies could capture the complexity of real life.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“The true state of every nation,” he observed, “is the state of common life. The manners of a people are not to be found in schools of learning or the palaces of greatness.” Johnson socialized with people at every level.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Life to him was a very serious proposition, and that’s the way he lived it, soberly and with due reflection.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“He understood how original his project was: completely honest self-revelation, and through that, a vision of the moral life. He understood he was trying to create a new method of character formation and implying a new type of hero, a hero of ruthlessly honest but sympathetic self-understanding.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Other people seek the approval of the crowd; Montaigne sought self-respect. “Every one can play his part in the farce, and act an honest role on the stage. But to be disciplined within, in one’s own breast, where all is permissible and all is concealed. That is the point.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Fewer people today see artists as oracles and novels as a form of revelation.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“We really do have dappled souls. The same ambition that drives us to build a new company also drives us to be materialistic and to exploit. The same lust that leads to children leads to adultery. The same confidence that can lead to daring and creativity can lead to self-worship and arrogance. Sin is not some demonic thing. It’s just our perverse tendency to fuck things up, to favor the short term over the long term, the lower over the higher. Sin, when it is committed over and over again, hardens into loyalty to a lower love.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“A person who embraces a calling doesn’t take a direct route to self-fulfillment.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Humility is freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time, but egotism is a ravenous hunger in a small space—self-concerned, competitive, and distinction-hungry. Humility is infused with lovely emotions like admiration, companionship, and gratitude. “Thankfulness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, “is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.” 9”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“You foolishly judge other people by their abilities, not by their worth. You do not have a strategy to build character, and without that, not only your inner life but also your external life will eventually fall to pieces.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“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”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“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. It can only be earned by a person who has endured some internal temptation, who has confronted their own weaknesses and who knows, “Well, if worse comes to worst, I can endure that. I can overcome that.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Montaigne once wrote, “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Many people today have deep moral and altruistic yearnings, but, lacking a moral vocabulary, they tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“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, The Road to Character

“We all know the love you have for the truth should be higher than the love you have for popularity.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“The French philosopher André Comte-Sponville argues that politeness is the prerequisite for the great virtues: “Morality is like a politeness of the soul, an etiquette of inner life, a code of duties.” 21 It is a series of practices that make you considerate of others.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“If you don’t have some inner integrity, eventually your Watergate, your scandal, your betrayal, will happen.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“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, The Road to Character

“It is also built sweetly through love and pleasure. When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you love a person deeply, you want to serve them and earn their regard. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies. Moreover, the struggle against the weaknesses in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason, compassion, and character are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride, greed, and self-deception. Everybody needs redemptive assistance from outside—from family, friends, ancestors, rules, traditions, institutions, exemplars, and, for believers, God. We all need people to tell us when we are wrong, to advise us on how to do right, and to encourage, support, arouse, cooperate, and inspire us along the way.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Benevolence is the twin of pride,”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“The moderate can only hope to be disciplined enough to combine in one soul, as Max Weber put it, both warm passion and a cool sense of proportion.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“and her maxims, which came in a steady, tough-minded flow: “God deals the cards and we play them,” “Sink or swim,” “Survive or perish.” The”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character