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- Author: David Brooks
- Full Title: The Road to Character
- Category: #books
- Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.
- they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was revisited in 1989, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered themselves
- “Thankfulness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, “is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.”9
- 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.
- Montaigne once wrote, “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.”
- Note: Wisdom arises from experience
- 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.
- intellectual humility is accurate self-awareness from a distance.
- Truly humble people are engaged in a great effort to magnify what is best in themselves and defeat what is worst, to become strong in the weak places.
- You won’t even achieve enduring external success unless you build a solid moral core. If you don’t have some inner integrity, eventually your Watergate, your scandal, your betrayal, will happen.
- 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.
- Only by quieting the self could they see the world clearly. Only by quieting the self could they understand other people and accept what they are offering.
- Over the last several decades, we’ve lost this language, this way of organizing life. We’re not bad. But we are morally inarticulate. We’re not more selfish or venal than people in other times, but we’ve lost the understanding of how character is built.
- As the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?”
- “It did not really matter what we expected from life,” he wrote, “but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.”11 Frankl concluded that fate had put a moral task and an intellectual task before him. It had given him an assignment.
- His moral task was to suffer well, to be worthy of his sufferings.
- Life, he concluded, “ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets before the individual.”
- As the Jewish Mishnah puts it, “It’s not your obligation to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from beginning it.”
- lacking a moral vocabulary, they tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I have impact? Or, worst of all: How can I use my beautiful self to help out those less fortunate than I?
- “Benevolence is the twin of pride,” Nathaniel Hawthorne had written.
- Character, as the Yale law professor Anthony T. Kronman has put it, is “an ensemble of settled dispositions—of habitual feelings and desires.”9 The idea is largely Aristotelian. If you act well, eventually you will be good. Change your behavior and eventually you rewire your brain.
- The tender character-building strategy is based on the idea that we can’t always resist our desires, but we can change and reorder our desires by focusing on our higher loves.
- To sacrifice for such things is sweet. It feels good to serve your beloved. Giving becomes cheerful giving because you are so eager to see the things you love prosper and thrive.
- Eisenhower was not an authentic man. He was a passionate man who lived, as much as his mother did, under a system of artificial restraints.
- Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together.
- As Harry Clor put it in his brilliant book On Moderation, “The fundamental division in the soul or psyche is at the root of our need for moderation.”
- The moderate is forever seeking a series of temporary arrangements, embedded in the specific situation of the moment, that will help him or her balance the desire for security with the desire for risk, the call of liberty with the need for restraint.
- The moderate can only hope to have a regulated character, stepping back to understand opposing perspectives and appreciating the merits of each.
- The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments. There are no ultimate solutions. The moderate can only hope to achieve a balance that is consistent with the needs of the moment.
- He aims to be passionate about his ends but deliberate about the proper means to realize them. The best moderate is blessed with a spirited soul and also the proper character to tame it.
- As the theologian Lisa Fullam has put it, “Humility is a virtue of self-understanding in context, acquired by the practice of other centeredness.”
- Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love.
- 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.
- The Victorian writer John Ruskin wrote, “The more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed upon me—that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”
- Many of us have no clear idea how to build character, no rigorous way to think about such things. We are clear about external, professional things but unclear about internal, moral ones. What the Victorians were to sex, we are to morality: everything is covered in euphemism.