David Brooks

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

Ehimlite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in developing their cognitive mission. But when it comes to the sort of growth Deresiewicz is talking about, everyone is on their own. An admissions officer might bias her criteria slightly away from the Résumé God and toward the quirky kid. A student may privately wrestle with taking a summer camp job instead of an emotionally vacuous but résumé-padding internship. But these struggles are informal, isolated and semi-articulate.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

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.

you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

wonderful people are made, not born _ that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.

You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.

Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.

If colleges are going to justify themselves, they are going to have to thrive at those things that require physical proximity. That includes moral and spiritual development. Very few of us cultivate our souls as hermits. We do it through small groups and relationships and in social contexts.

A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.

In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:

if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.