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Throughout The Road to Character, David Brooks asserts that character is not something a person is born with, but something a person builds. A person builds character through struggling against adversity and their personal weaknesses. With every triumph over weakness comes not primarily happiness, but increased strength of character. In order to build character, a person must acknowledge that they have weaknesses as well as talents so that they can confront these weaknesses and overcome them. Therefore, someone who builds character is a moral realist, believing that human nature is both good and evil. All the exemplars in The Road to Character are chosen by David Brooks because they share the trait of character-building. Each highlighted figure began with a vulnerability that they transcended over the course of their lives, building a remarkable strength through the struggle.
Character Quotes in The Road to Character
The The Road to Character quotes below are all either spoken by Character or refer to Character. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Introduction: Adam II
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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.
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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.
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Chapter 1: The Shift
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Character is not innate or automatic. You have to build it with effort and artistry.
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Chapter 2: The Summoned Self
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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.
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Chapter 3: Self-Conquest
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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.
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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.
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Chapter 4: Struggle
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Suffering becomes a fearful gift, very different from that other gift, happiness, conventionally defined. The latter brings pleasure, but the former cultivates character.
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Chapter 6: Dignity
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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.
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Chapter 7: Love
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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.
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Chapter 9: Self-Examination
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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.
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Chapter 10: The Big Me
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The realists believed in cultivation, civilization, and artifice; the romanticists believed in nature, the individual, and sincerity.
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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.
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Get the entire The Road to Character LitChart as a printable PDF.
Character Term Timeline in The Road to Character
The timeline below shows where the term Character appears in The Road to Character. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction: Adam II
...their career and in the external world. Eulogy virtues are aspects of a person’s inner character, such as kindness and honesty—the traits about a person that are likely to get referenced...
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...strength to survive hardships or be dependable. Brooks claims that when one doesn’t build inner character and nurture their Adam II, their external success will eventually crumble as well.
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...that his book will be about Adam II and people who have built strong inner character. He explains that he himself was drawn to a life of inflating himself and his...
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...confrontation of one’s limitations—before it shifted to self-interest. Next, he will outline the process of character-building by exploring the life journeys of a number of people, because he believes that example...
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Brooks then describes the people who seem to possess character. They have inner balance and are strong in the face of hardship, they make others...
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Chapter 1: The Shift
...humility is morally impressive: it actively resists vices, such as pride, and works to build character.
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...moral realist understands that everyone is made of “crooked timber.” Given that everyone is flawed, character doesn’t emerge from one’s talents or achievements, but out of one’s struggle against their flaws....
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...has this responsibility to become more moral each day. People like his friend understand that character is not innate, but that it is built through hard work. One’s success—one’s Adam I—depends...
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...the words “fight” and “struggle” apply to one’s confrontation with their weaknesses, the building of character is not always war-like in the usual sense. Often, character is built through love and...
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Brooks admits that no one can build character without help. Confronting and defeating one’s vices is too difficult a task to undertake without...
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Brooks claims that, in the struggle for character, it doesn’t matter where a person works or whether they are upper- or middle-class. All...
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Brooks states his belief that the old formula for character building shouldn’t have been given up. People don’t know how to build character anymore, and...
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Chapter 2: The Summoned Self
...life was completely opposed to what his dream life would’ve been, he realized that his character would be shaped by how he responded internally to his circumstances. He couldn’t expect anything...
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...acts of service are duties. It employed women in service jobs and taught them courage, character, and heroism. This was during a time when the Christian Church was responding to industrialization...
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...community service to satisfy their inner moral questions. Instead of teaching students how to build character, institutions these days simply assign community service. Consequently, moral questions are turned into questions of...
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Chapter 3: Self-Conquest
...in nature, flawed and gifted, and that the central endeavor in life is to build character.
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...slowly accumulate into larger ones. Without the concept of “sin,” there is no concept of character-building. Sin provides the adversity that the good person fights against to become stronger.
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...is impossible to be self-controlled all the time. She taught her boys that love builds character. When one focuses their love on something high—such as one’s country, children, or a good...
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...they can’t lead entirely pure lives, devoted to one value. They can, however, regulate their character and recognize the merits in opposing perspectives in themselves and things around them. In a...
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Chapter 4: Struggle
...wholly into the commitments that originally caused their suffering. In so doing, the sufferer cultivates character, not pleasure.
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Chapter 5: Self-Mastery
...people believed that one struggles to be moral not because of a weakness in their character, but because they lack a good role model or ideal. They believed that admiration for...
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Chapter 7: Love
...of faith to continue hurting him. This shows her bravery, her desire to strengthen her character, and her passion for living according to the truth. Eventually, she and her father reconciled,...
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Chapter 9: Self-Examination
...of any of it. But through writing, he constructed a coherent worldview that gave his character stability and wholeness.
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Chapter 10: The Big Me
...people to develop a utilitarian logic, viewing everything as an opportunity to advance their status. “Character” changes to mean resilience, confidence, tenacity—anything that makes them stand out. In order to achieve...
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...1. Human beings seek lives of purpose, not lives of pleasure. 2. The road to character starts with the understanding that human beings are flawed creatures. 3. Human beings are divided,...
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The people in The Road to Character followed different roads to character. Even though they subscribed to moral realism, they approached it...
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...failing, and rise to the challenge again with new strength. Over a lifetime of building character, outer ambition comes into balance with inner aspiration, and a person achieves a “flow,” their...
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