David Brooks Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.”
-- David Brooks

#Successful #Two #Belief

“When you're running for president, you're a guest in the living room for four years. And if people don't think you're going to be around the living room as a pleasant experience, they're not going to vote for you even if they agree with you.”
-- David Brooks

#Running #Thinking #Years

“The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.”
-- David Brooks

#Brain #Mind #Desire

“When you're running for president you have to take some risks and you've got to show people something fresh and you've got to stay interesting.”
-- David Brooks

#Running #People #Interesting

“Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.”
-- David Brooks

#Art #Commitment #People

“When your institution is under assault, you're feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don't turn inward, go outward.”
-- David Brooks

#Feelings #Inward #Weight

“To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.”
-- David Brooks

#Atheism #Logical #Form

“When your institution is under threat, you feel you have a lot of hostility, you feel things are slipping away, you have got internal problems, there's a tendency to turn inward and to focus on yourselves.”
-- David Brooks

#Focus #Inward #Slipping

“Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.”
-- David Brooks

#Jumping #Race #Lust

“America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might.”
-- David Brooks

#Military #Order #Play

“Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.”
-- David Brooks

#Destiny #Life Is #Acknowledge

“If I had to fault President [Barack] Obama, I would say that sometimes governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.”
-- David Brooks

#Civilization #President #Faults

“If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.”
-- David Brooks

#Buying #Furniture #Looks

“I'm not the most emotionally attuned guy in the world. My wife says that me writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony.”
-- David Brooks

#Writing #Wife #Guy

“Since 2005, a majority of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, have said it was wrong and a mistake to go into Iraq.”
-- David Brooks

#Mistake #Iraq #Majority

“Trade agreements are a net benefit for the world, and a net benefit for our foreign policy, and in the long run, given the dislocations, are a net benefit for us, too.”
-- David Brooks

#Running #Agreement #Long

“I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.”
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Clinton #Blair

“I think Americans expect optimism in their leadership. The most popular and effective leaders, whether it was Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or Jack Kennedy, brought to it a sense of optimism and possibility.”
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Optimism #Leader

“I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.”
-- David Brooks

#Media #Culture #Jackals

“People tend to marry people with similar-width noses, eyes similarly apart, with complementary immune systems.”
-- David Brooks

#Eye #People #Noses

“The brain writes the autobiography of our species at the conscious level.”
-- David Brooks

#Writing #Brain #Levels

“We have the choice to choose how we're going to educate our emotions.”
-- David Brooks

#Choices #Emotion #Educate

“It's impossible for one person to think of everything.”
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Impossible #Persons

“I want to make big films. That's always been my ambition.”
-- David Brooks

#Ambition #Want #Film

“It's almost inherent, but I'm a massive [Stanley] Kubrick fan. I'm a big admirer of what guys like Christopher Nolan have been able to do. For me, to be able to try to make big films that reach a lot of people, and that hopefully have something to say, is a lofty goal, but that's my goal.”
-- David Brooks

#Goal #People #Guy

“I want to try to make big films that hopefully connect with people.”
-- David Brooks

#People #Trying #Want

“I was really fortunate that I went to a high school where we actually had a film theory program.”
-- David Brooks

#School #Film #Program

“As a director, I like trying to unlock the subtext of the scene and try to put the camera in a place that helps that.”
-- David Brooks

#Trying #Cameras #Directors

“Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon.”
-- David Brooks

#Unexpected #Film #Beats

“We don't have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences.”
-- David Brooks

#Art #Emotional #Giving