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.

I make honorable things pleasant to children.” A teacher from Sparta

The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who...

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don’t want it in...

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

The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned.

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...

I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a...

Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world...

Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

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.

I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from...

When most people think about the future, they dream up ways that they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don’t usually talk about...

Angela Duckworth has shown how important grit and perseverance are to lifetime outcomes. College students who report that they finish whatever they begin have higher grades than their peers, even ones with higher SATs.

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive...

The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.

It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.

There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.

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

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.