Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a...

In 1950, the [Gallup organization] asked high school kids, are you a very important person? Then 12 percent said yes. Asked again in 2005, 80 percent said, yes, I’m a very important person.

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’t bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get...

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.

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

Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a...

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...

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...

Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college...

If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the...

They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.

What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz’s moral purpose...

(A middle-class child’s) parents didn’t just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.

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

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

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions...

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.

Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the...

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending...

(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...

We are called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma. Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show...

They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to prove anything to the world:

… there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven’t lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse...

Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.

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.

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

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...

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

Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular...

Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed,

most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.

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

Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive...

there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their...

Apparently, we have become such a hyper-individualized culture that it is impossible to develop an argument based on how individual cases fit into the fabric of the common good.

People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard.

[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.

He read vividly.

Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; “The night cometh.

The inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.

In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time...

In childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid and fresh, and sometimes hits with terrifying force.

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

Humanities are the instructors of enchantment.

vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing yourself into a historical process. They involve compensating for the brevity of life by finding membership in a historic commitment.