{"author":"David Brooks","author_id":"David+Brooks","total_quotes":79,"quotes":[{"text":"Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["passion","self-discipline"],"id":7066,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["genetics","information","knowledge","river"],"id":8964,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["kindlehighlight"],"id":17611,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["bureaucracy","character"],"id":28471,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["culture","discipleship","education","renewal","transformation"],"id":34405,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["assumptions","culture"],"id":35271,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"People with character are capable of long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings through thick and thin. People with character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["character","commitment","love","maturity"],"id":36026,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"... There are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven't lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don't associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it's just that they are giving themselves a D- rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["low-self-esteem","pride","self-centered","self-pity","solipsistic","unworthy"],"id":48482,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["curiosity","liberal-arts","openness"],"id":52484,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; 'The night cometh.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["mortality"],"id":59629,"author_id":"David+Brooks"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":79,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}