The Road to Character

by

David Brooks

David Brooks Character Analysis

David Brooks is the author of The Road to Character. In this work, he critiques the moral inarticulateness of modern-day society. He wrote this book in part to restore his own inner life and character, finding himself a victim of the competitive, fast-paced environment of the present day. A political and social critic, he comments throughout the work on the societal shift from moral realism to moral romanticism and finally to the meritocracy, outlining the decline these shifts caused in people’s ability to build character. Through biographies of historical figures whom he admires, he lays out a time-tested approach to building character. The overall goal of his work is to turn society’s attention away from Adam I, the external, career-oriented side of human nature, and back to Adam II, the inner side of human nature that values morality and character.

David Brooks Quotes in The Road to Character

The The Road to Character quotes below are all either spoken by David Brooks or refer to David Brooks. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Self-Renunciation vs. Self-Love Theme Icon
).
Introduction: Adam II Quotes

To nurture your Adam I career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam II moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Related Symbols: Adam I, Adam II
Page Number: xii
Explanation and Analysis:

Without a rigorous focus on the Adam II side of our nature, it is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity […] A humiliating gap opens up between your actual self and your desired self.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Related Symbols: Adam I, Adam II
Page Number: xv
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1: The Shift Quotes

Character is not innate or automatic. You have to build it with effort and artistry.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower , George Marshall
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:

Only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction. Adam I aims for happiness, but Adam II knows that happiness is insufficient. The ultimate joys are moral joys.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dorothy Day , Augustine
Related Symbols: Adam I, Adam II
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2: The Summoned Self Quotes

In [Frances Perkins’s] method, you don’t ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do? In this scheme of things we don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Frances Perkins, Viktor Frankl
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

One sees this in people with a vocation—a certain rapt expression, a hungry desire to perform a dance or run an organization to its utmost perfection. They feel the joy of having their values in deep harmony with their behavior.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Related Symbols: Adam II
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:

Perkins didn’t so much choose her life. She responded to the call of a felt necessity. A person who embraces a calling doesn’t take a direct route to self-fulfillment. She is willing to surrender the things that are most dear, and by seeking to forget herself and submerge herself she finds a purpose that defines and fulfills herself. Such vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Frances Perkins
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3: Self-Conquest Quotes

People become solid, stable, and worthy of self-respect because they have defeated or at least struggled with their own demons. If you take away the concept of sin, then you take away the thing the good person struggles against.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Ida Stover Eisenhower, Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:

Eisenhower […] held that artifice is man’s nature. We start out with raw material, some good, some bad, and this nature has to be pruned, girdled, formed, repressed, molded, and often restrained, rather than paraded in public. A personality is a product of cultivation. The true self is what you have built from your nature, not just what your nature started out with.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

Like the nation’s founders, [Eisenhower] built his politics on distrust of what people might do if they have unchecked power […] [He] felt in his bones that man is a problem to himself.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4: Struggle Quotes

[Dorothy Day] was incapable of living life on the surface only—for pleasures, success, even for service—but needed a deep and total commitment to something holy.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dorothy Day
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:

Suffering becomes a fearful gift, very different from that other gift, happiness, conventionally defined. The latter brings pleasure, but the former cultivates character.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dorothy Day
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5: Self-Mastery Quotes

The customs of [an] institution structure the soul, making it easier to be good. They guide behavior gentle along certain time-tested lines. By practicing the customs of an institution, we are not alone; we are admitted into a community that transcends time.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), George Marshall
Page Number: 116
Explanation and Analysis:

The magnanimous leader does not have a normal set of social relations. There is a residual sadness to him, as there is in many grandly ambitious people who surrender companionship for the sake of their lofty goals. He can never allow himself to be silly or simply happy and free. He is like marble.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), George Marshall
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6: Dignity Quotes

The non-violent path is an ironic path: the weak can triumph by enduring suffering; the oppressed must not fight back if they hope to defeat their oppressor; those on the side of justice can be corrupted by their own righteousness.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin , Martin Luther King, Jr.
Related Symbols: Adam II
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

Social sin requires a hammering down of the door by people who are simultaneously aware they are unworthy to be so daring. This is a philosophy of power, a philosophy of power for people who combine extreme conviction with extreme self-skepticism.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower , Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7: Love Quotes

This moment was Eliot’s agency moment, the moment when she began the process by which she would stop being blown about by her voids and begin to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot
Page Number: 164
Explanation and Analysis:

Love impels people to service. If love starts with a downward motion, burrowing into the vulnerability of the self, exposing nakedness, it ends with an active upward motion. It arouses great energy and desire to serve.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot , George Lewes
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:

For Eliot, holiness isn’t in the next world but is embedded in a mundane thing like a marriage, which ties one down but gives one concrete and daily opportunities for self-sacrifice and service.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot , George Lewes
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: Ordered Love Quotes

If you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Augustine
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:

Knowledge is not enough for tranquility and goodness, because it doesn’t contain the motivation to be good. Only love impels action.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Augustine
Page Number: 211
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9: Self-Examination Quotes

Johnson tried to lift people up to emulate heroes. Montaigne feared that those who try to rise above what is realistically human end up sinking into the subhuman.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Samuel Johnson , Michel de Montaigne
Page Number: 234
Explanation and Analysis:

Johnson stands now as an example of human wisdom. From his scattered youth, his diverse faculties cohered into a single faculty—a mode of seeing and judging the world that was as much emotional as intellectual.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Samuel Johnson
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10: The Big Me Quotes

The realists believed in cultivation, civilization, and artifice; the romanticists believed in nature, the individual, and sincerity.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Page Number: 244
Explanation and Analysis:

If you believe that the ultimate oracle is the True Self inside, then of course you become emotivist—you make moral judgements on the basis of feelings that burble up. Of course you become a relativist. One True Self has no basis to judge or argue with another True Self. Of course you become an individualist, since the ultimate arbiter is the authentic self within and not any community standard or external horizon of significance without.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Page Number: 259
Explanation and Analysis:

Eventually [humble people] achieve moments of catharsis when outer ambition comes into balance with inner aspiration, when there is a unity of effort between Adam I and Adam II, when there is that ultimate tranquility and that feeling of flow—when moral nature and external skills are united in one defining effort.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day , George Marshall
Related Symbols: Adam I, Adam II
Page Number: 270
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Road to Character LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Road to Character PDF

David Brooks Quotes in The Road to Character

The The Road to Character quotes below are all either spoken by David Brooks or refer to David Brooks. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Self-Renunciation vs. Self-Love Theme Icon
).
Introduction: Adam II Quotes

To nurture your Adam I career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam II moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Related Symbols: Adam I, Adam II
Page Number: xii
Explanation and Analysis:

Without a rigorous focus on the Adam II side of our nature, it is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity […] A humiliating gap opens up between your actual self and your desired self.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Related Symbols: Adam I, Adam II
Page Number: xv
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1: The Shift Quotes

Character is not innate or automatic. You have to build it with effort and artistry.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower , George Marshall
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:

Only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction. Adam I aims for happiness, but Adam II knows that happiness is insufficient. The ultimate joys are moral joys.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dorothy Day , Augustine
Related Symbols: Adam I, Adam II
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2: The Summoned Self Quotes

In [Frances Perkins’s] method, you don’t ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do? In this scheme of things we don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Frances Perkins, Viktor Frankl
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

One sees this in people with a vocation—a certain rapt expression, a hungry desire to perform a dance or run an organization to its utmost perfection. They feel the joy of having their values in deep harmony with their behavior.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Related Symbols: Adam II
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:

Perkins didn’t so much choose her life. She responded to the call of a felt necessity. A person who embraces a calling doesn’t take a direct route to self-fulfillment. She is willing to surrender the things that are most dear, and by seeking to forget herself and submerge herself she finds a purpose that defines and fulfills herself. Such vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Frances Perkins
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3: Self-Conquest Quotes

People become solid, stable, and worthy of self-respect because they have defeated or at least struggled with their own demons. If you take away the concept of sin, then you take away the thing the good person struggles against.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Ida Stover Eisenhower, Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:

Eisenhower […] held that artifice is man’s nature. We start out with raw material, some good, some bad, and this nature has to be pruned, girdled, formed, repressed, molded, and often restrained, rather than paraded in public. A personality is a product of cultivation. The true self is what you have built from your nature, not just what your nature started out with.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

Like the nation’s founders, [Eisenhower] built his politics on distrust of what people might do if they have unchecked power […] [He] felt in his bones that man is a problem to himself.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4: Struggle Quotes

[Dorothy Day] was incapable of living life on the surface only—for pleasures, success, even for service—but needed a deep and total commitment to something holy.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dorothy Day
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:

Suffering becomes a fearful gift, very different from that other gift, happiness, conventionally defined. The latter brings pleasure, but the former cultivates character.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dorothy Day
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5: Self-Mastery Quotes

The customs of [an] institution structure the soul, making it easier to be good. They guide behavior gentle along certain time-tested lines. By practicing the customs of an institution, we are not alone; we are admitted into a community that transcends time.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), George Marshall
Page Number: 116
Explanation and Analysis:

The magnanimous leader does not have a normal set of social relations. There is a residual sadness to him, as there is in many grandly ambitious people who surrender companionship for the sake of their lofty goals. He can never allow himself to be silly or simply happy and free. He is like marble.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), George Marshall
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6: Dignity Quotes

The non-violent path is an ironic path: the weak can triumph by enduring suffering; the oppressed must not fight back if they hope to defeat their oppressor; those on the side of justice can be corrupted by their own righteousness.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin , Martin Luther King, Jr.
Related Symbols: Adam II
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

Social sin requires a hammering down of the door by people who are simultaneously aware they are unworthy to be so daring. This is a philosophy of power, a philosophy of power for people who combine extreme conviction with extreme self-skepticism.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower , Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7: Love Quotes

This moment was Eliot’s agency moment, the moment when she began the process by which she would stop being blown about by her voids and begin to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot
Page Number: 164
Explanation and Analysis:

Love impels people to service. If love starts with a downward motion, burrowing into the vulnerability of the self, exposing nakedness, it ends with an active upward motion. It arouses great energy and desire to serve.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot , George Lewes
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:

For Eliot, holiness isn’t in the next world but is embedded in a mundane thing like a marriage, which ties one down but gives one concrete and daily opportunities for self-sacrifice and service.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot , George Lewes
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: Ordered Love Quotes

If you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Augustine
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:

Knowledge is not enough for tranquility and goodness, because it doesn’t contain the motivation to be good. Only love impels action.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Augustine
Page Number: 211
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9: Self-Examination Quotes

Johnson tried to lift people up to emulate heroes. Montaigne feared that those who try to rise above what is realistically human end up sinking into the subhuman.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Samuel Johnson , Michel de Montaigne
Page Number: 234
Explanation and Analysis:

Johnson stands now as an example of human wisdom. From his scattered youth, his diverse faculties cohered into a single faculty—a mode of seeing and judging the world that was as much emotional as intellectual.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Samuel Johnson
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10: The Big Me Quotes

The realists believed in cultivation, civilization, and artifice; the romanticists believed in nature, the individual, and sincerity.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Page Number: 244
Explanation and Analysis:

If you believe that the ultimate oracle is the True Self inside, then of course you become emotivist—you make moral judgements on the basis of feelings that burble up. Of course you become a relativist. One True Self has no basis to judge or argue with another True Self. Of course you become an individualist, since the ultimate arbiter is the authentic self within and not any community standard or external horizon of significance without.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker)
Page Number: 259
Explanation and Analysis:

Eventually [humble people] achieve moments of catharsis when outer ambition comes into balance with inner aspiration, when there is a unity of effort between Adam I and Adam II, when there is that ultimate tranquility and that feeling of flow—when moral nature and external skills are united in one defining effort.

Related Characters: David Brooks (speaker), Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day , George Marshall
Related Symbols: Adam I, Adam II
Page Number: 270
Explanation and Analysis: