Bejinha

“familiar process before they can acknowledge how comprehensive their problem is. First, they deny that there’s something wrong with their life. Then they intensify their efforts to follow the old failing plan. Then they try to treat themselves with some new thrill: They have an affair, drink more, or start doing drugs. Only when all this fails do they admit that they need to change the way they think about life.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“A person who tries to treat life as if it were an extension of school often becomes what the Danish novelist Matias Dalsgaard calls an “insecure overachiever”: “Such a person must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon, and yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem. It’s an impossible situation. You can’t compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top. But this person takes no notice and hopes that the problem down in the foundation won’t be found out if only the construction work on the top keeps going.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“While it pretends not to, it subliminally sends the message that those who are smarter and more accomplished are actually worth more than those who are not.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“In this way, moral formation is not individual; it is relational. Character is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong and about your own willpower. Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments—temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood. Commitments are the school for moral formation. When your life is defined by fervent commitments, you are on the second mountain.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life