David Brooks

Our commitments allow us to move to a higher level of freedom.

Our commitments build our moral character.

Depression makes it hard to imagine a time when things will ever be better.

Our commitments give us a sense of purpose.

If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self.

A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. But there’s a better thing to have—moral joy. And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love.

The fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we choose and live out those sometimes clashing commitments.

I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you.

Living a good life requires a much vaster transformation. It’s not enough to work on your own weaknesses. The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.

My core point is that happiness is good, but joy is better. Just as the second mountain is a fuller and richer phase of life after the first mountain, joy is a fuller and richer state beyond happiness.

Some people live joyfully day by day. Their daily actions are aligned with their ultimate commitments. They have given themselves away, united and wholeheartedly.

A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is. When this happens, they become fragile.

The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.

The more you are living a committed life well, the more joy will be your steady state, the frame of mind you carry around with you and shine on others. You will become a joyful person.

The people who radiate a permanent joy have given themselves over to lives of deep and loving commitment. Giving has become their nature, and little by little they have made their souls incandescent.

Happiness can be tasted alone. But permanent joy comes out of an enmeshed and embedded life. Happiness happens when a personal desire is fulfilled. Permanent moral joy seems to emerge when desire is turned outward for others.

You have to lose yourself to find yourself, give yourself away to get everything back.

Joy is not a self-standing emotion, it is the crown of a well-lived life. Joy is the emotional dimension of life that goes well and that is led well.

Once the dominant ethos was about doing your duty, but now life was about doing your own thing. Where once the group had come first, now the individual came first.

But when individualism becomes the absolutely dominant ethos of a civilization—when it is not counterbalanced with any competing ethos—then the individuals within it may have maximum freedom, but the links between the individuals slowly begin to dissolve.

In a culture of “I’m Free to Be Myself,” individuals are lonely and loosely attached. Community is attenuated, connections are dissolved, and loneliness spreads.

Freedom sucks. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation.

The ultimate heart’s desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone.

When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect.

There is some piece of your consciousness that has no shape, size, weight, or color. This is the piece of you that is of infinite value and dignity.

The soul is the seedbed of your moral consciousness and your ethical sense.

A commitment is a promise made from love. A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a return—out of sheer lovingness.

Our commitments give us our identity. They are how we introduce ourselves to strangers. They are the subjects that make our eyes shine in conversation.

We have become too cognitive when we should be more emotional; too utilitarian when we should be using a moral lens; too individualistic when we should be more communal.

If you don’t know what your life is for, how does it help to be told that your future is limitless? That just ups the pressure.

Connection happens at the nexus of truth and love. Truth without love is harshness. Love without truth is sentimentality. But if you can be completely honest with somebody in the context of loving support, then you have a trusting relationship.

Community builders believe in radical mutuality. They utterly reject the notion that some people have everything in order, and others are screwups. In their view, we are all stumblers.

As W. H. Auden put it, the task in life is to 'love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.

Community builders talk about the need to take a whole-person approach. When a child enters school, she doesn’t leave behind her healthcare issues, her safety issues, her emotional traumas, her nutritional needs, her need for purpose and meaning.

The thing everybody knows about finding a vocation is that it’s quite different from finding a career.

The sense of calling comes from the question, What is my responsibility here?

The summons to vocation is a very holy thing. It feels mystical, like a call from deep to deep.

To feel wonder in the face of beauty is to be grandly astonished. A person entranced by wonder is pulled out of the normal voice-in-your-head self-absorption and finds herself awed by something greater than herself.

The crucial terrain to be explored in any vocation search is the terrain of your heart and soul, your long-term motivation. Knowledge is plentiful; motivation is scarce.

The people who make the wisest vocation decisions are the people who live their lives every day with their desires awake and alive.

Sometimes it’s tragedy that shocks us out of false desires and helps us see our real ones.

Vocation can be a cure for self-centeredness, because to do the work well you have to pay attention to the task itself.

Just as all writing is really rewriting, all commitment is really recommitment. It’s saying yes to the thing you’ve already said yes to.

Marriage comes as a revolution. To have lived as a one and then suddenly become a two—that is an invasion. And yet there is a prize. People in long, happy marriages have won the lottery of life.

Marriage is knowing she likes to get to the airport early. Marriage is taking the time to make the bed even though you know that if you didn’t do it she probably would.

At the end of the day there is the brutal grinding effort of surrendering the ego to the altar of marriage, giving up part of yourself, the desires you have, for the larger union.

Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make. Marriage colors your life and everything in it.

We’ve all met couples like that, who have come to look alike, smile alike. I know a couple, Jim and Deb Fallows, who are famous in our circle for having the happiest marriage.

Marriage is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted. At the far end, when done well, you see people enjoying the deepest steady joy you can find on this earth.

Love starts as a focusing of attention. The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Intimacy happens when somebody shares something emotionally meaningful, and the other person receives it and shares back.

Your personality is the hidden history of the places where love entered your life or was withdrawn from your life.

Love is possible only if two people eventually reveal the center of their existences.

People are judged as much by their listening as by what they say, because when you think you are passively listening to others, you are actually teaching them about yourself.

Love plows open the hard crust of our personality and exposes the fertile soil below. Love decenters the self. It teaches us that our riches are in another.

Love can produce the most prodigious deeds in the most immediate way, without guidance by principle or command of duty. The lover knows the value of beauty and also knows that he cannot live well, or perhaps at all, alone.

Marriage is a fifty-year conversation. The most important factor in when you think about marrying someone is, Would I enjoy talking with this person for the rest of my life?

When you are making a marital commitment, you are making a vow, a promise. So another crucial question is, Does this person keep his or her promises?

Marriage starts as a joy and ends up an education. It starts as a joy because at first you get to spend every day with the person you care about most in the world, the one who makes you happiest just to be around. But then it turns into something else.

Marital love is a seeing love. Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this I mean mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company.

Marriage, like all commitments, isn’t there to make you happy; it is there to make you grow.

Recommitment often means putting your own sins on the table. Forbearance means acknowledging the wrongs that have been committed, and even the anger that they have created, but it puts anger in the context of love.

It is an immemorial law of human nature that behavior change precedes and causes attitudinal change. If you behave kindly toward a person, you will become kind and you will cherish them.

Trust the person you married. Let the other person help you. Trust them to know what’s right. Be loyal.

Second love is the kind of love people have for each other after they’ve seen each other at their worst, after they’ve forgiven a few times and been forgiven, after they can take some pride in having survived together and some comfort in the knowledge that they will survive.

The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.

Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.

We are alive in the natural world, and we use science to understand that layer of aliveness. We are also alive in another dimension, the dimension of spirit and meaning. We use the biblical stories to understand that dimension of aliveness.

If there are no overarching stories, then life is meaningless. Life does not feel meaningless. These stories provide, in their simple yet endlessly complex ways, a living script.

We are commanded to co-create the world. We are commanded to finish what God has begun. Our common salvation comes through works and good deeds.

The Christian way is the little way—small acts of radical kindness done with great love.

In my world, you take possession of your life, exercising agency. But in the Christian one, you are not even the owner of yourself. Your talents merely flow through you; you give yourself to the one who made you.

Religion doesn’t produce as many truly good people, like Wes, as you’d think it would. Religious people talk so much about holiness and goodness and love, you’d think they would be more virtuous than atheists and agnostics.

The Jew does not experience faith primarily in solitude. He or she experiences it primarily in community, in what one does with others. The synagogue is not the locus of Jewish life. The Shabbat dinner table is.

Moments of spiritual transcendence came to me as mesmerizing beauty.

The line between good and evil passes not between tribes or nations but straight through every human heart.

The Two Mountains: A Journey of Transformation

David Brooks introduces the concept of the 'two mountains' to describe the journey of personal and moral development. The first mountain represents the pursuit of individual success, characterized by career achievements and personal happiness. However, many find this climb ultimately unsatisfying, leading to a descent into the valley of suffering. The second mountain is about a shift in focus from self-centered goals to a life of service and commitment to others. Brooks explains, 'Some people get to the top of that first mountain, taste success, and find it…unsatisfying. Is this all there is? they wonder.' This transformation is marked by a deeper sense of joy and fulfillment.

The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.

The Role of Recognition in Human Connection

'Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water,' Brooks states. He discusses the human need for recognition and how it affects our sense of self-worth and belonging. Through stories of people who felt seen and understood, Brooks illustrates the transformative impact of making others feel valued and respected. This idea is central to building strong relationships and fostering a healthy society.

The Valley of Suffering: A Crucible for Growth

Brooks emphasizes that the valley of suffering is a critical phase in the journey from the first to the second mountain. This period of adversity exposes the superficial aspects of our lives and forces us to confront our True selves. 'These seasons of suffering have a way of exposing the deepest parts of ourselves and reminding us that we’re not the people we thought we were,' he writes. The valley can either break individuals or prompt a profound transformation, leading them to live for others and embrace deeper commitments.

Commitment: The Heart of the Second Mountain

The second mountain is defined by the commitments individuals make to others, whether through vocation, marriage, faith, or community. Brooks argues that True fulfillment comes from these deep commitments, which require a shift from a self-centered to an other-centered mindset. He explains, 'A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a reward. A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.' This committed life is about being deeply rooted and fully invested in the well-being of others.

The Distinction Between Happiness and Joy

Brooks emphasizes the crucial difference between happiness and joy. Happiness is often tied to personal achievements and the fulfillment of desires, while joy transcends the self and involves a deeper connection with others or with nature. 'Happiness is what we aim for on the first mountain. Joy is a by-product of living on the second mountain,' he states. Joy is experienced in moments of self-forgetting, such as when a mother gazes at her baby or friends dance together.

The Role of Mentors

Brooks highlights the profound impact mentors have on shaping an individual's career and personal growth. Good mentors impart tacit wisdom and practical knowledge that cannot be learned from books alone. He illustrates this through the experiences of E.O. Wilson, who benefited immensely from his mentors. 'Good mentors teach you the tacit wisdom embedded in any craft,' Brooks notes. This mentorship is described as a personal, friendly, and shared experience that rewires one's internal framework.

The Importance of Community and Relationality

Brooks emphasizes the importance of deep, meaningful relationships in driving personal and societal change. He contrasts the impersonal nature of large welfare systems with the transformative power of personal connections. Community builders, or 'weavers,' focus on creating spaces for deep conversations and mutual support. 'Relationship is the driver of change. Think of who made you who you are. It was probably a parent, a teacher, or a mentor,' he writes. This relational approach fosters a sense of belonging and mutual support.

The Relationalist Worldview

In contrast to hyper-individualism, Brooks advocates for a relationalist worldview, which places relationships, commitment, and the desires of the heart and soul at the center of life. This perspective sees society as a web of connections and emphasizes the importance of making and keeping commitments to others. 'Life is not a solitary journey. It is building a home together,' Brooks asserts. This approach fosters a sense of belonging and purpose, creating a more connected and compassionate society.

Embrace Suffering as a Catalyst for Growth

When faced with adversity, use it as an opportunity to delve deeper into your True self and reassess your life’s purpose. This can lead to a more meaningful and fulfilling existence.

Make Deep Commitments

Identify areas in your life where you can make strong, unwavering commitments—whether it’s to a vocation, a relationship, a faith, or a community. These commitments will provide a sense of purpose and joy.

Shift from Self-Centered to Other-Centered Living

Focus on how you can serve others and contribute to their well-being. This shift in perspective can lead to a more satisfying and enriched life, as you find joy in helping others thrive.

Seek Collective Experiences

Engage in activities that promote collective joy, such as dancing, team sports, or community service. These experiences help transcend the self and create a sense of unity and flow.

Cultivate Deep Relationships

Invest time and effort into forming meaningful connections with others. Create spaces for honest conversations and mutual support, recognizing that these relationships are the foundation of personal and societal transformation.

Live in the Middle Voice

Strive to align your will with God's will through humility and reverence. Avoid the extremes of passive submission and active domination. Instead, engage in a participatory relationship with the divine, where your actions are in harmony with a higher purpose.

Some people get to the top of that first mountain, taste success, and find it…unsatisfying. 'Is this all there is?' they wonder.

A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a reward. A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

Happiness is what we aim for on the first mountain. Joy is a by-product of living on the second mountain.

The meritocracy’s soul-flattening influence is survivable if you have your own competing moral system that exists in you alongside it, but if you have no competing value system, the meritocracy swallows you whole.

Suffering teaches us gratitude. Normally we take love and friendship for granted. But in seasons of suffering, we throw ourselves on others and appreciate the gifts that our loved ones offer.

Individualism says, Shoot for personal happiness, but the person on the second mountain says, No, I shoot for meaning and moral joy.

The quality of the conversation is the quality of the marriage.

Marriage is a fifty-year conversation.

The object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

Life is not a solitary journey. It is building a home together.

Rebuilding community involves seeing that the neighborhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change.

Freedom sucks. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks.

The Power of Being Seen

David Brooks emphasizes, 'Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being.' He shares his journey from emotional detachment to empathy, highlighting the transformative power of truly seeing and understanding others. Brooks illustrates this with personal anecdotes, such as his realization of the importance of emotional expression after a panel discussion with theater people. This shift in perspective underscores the profound impact of making others feel seen and valued.

The Complexity of Depression

'Depression makes it hard to imagine a time when things will ever be better,' Brooks writes, sharing the story of his friend Pete's battle with depression. He emphasizes that depression distorts reality, making it difficult for individuals to see a way out. Brooks underscores the importance of empathy and understanding, suggesting that creating an atmosphere where someone feels seen and understood can be more effective than trying to coax them out of their depression.

It’s enough to create an atmosphere in which they can share their experience. It’s enough to offer them the comfort of being seen.

Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water.

Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own.

To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

Successful friendship, like successful therapy, is a balance of deference and defiance.

Wisdom is practiced when people come together to form what Parker Palmer called a 'community of truth.

Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody.

The Art of Active Listening

'If you’re here in this conversation, you’re going to stop doing anything else and just pay attention to this,' Brooks emphasizes. He introduces the SLANT method: 'sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, track the speaker.' This approach to active listening involves fully engaging with the speaker, making them feel heard and valued. Brooks illustrates this with examples like Oprah Winfrey, who visibly reacts to her guests' emotions, creating a powerful connection.

Transformation Through Generativity

'A generative leader serves the people under him, lifts other people’s vision to higher sights, and helps other people become better versions of themselves,' Brooks writes. He highlights the concept of generativity, where individuals shift from a self-centered mindset to one that prioritizes nurturing and guiding the next generations. This transformation is illustrated through the story of a man who evolves from an ambitious careerist to a community-focused mentor and city planner.

The Influence of Historical Settlement Patterns

'The electoral map of 1896 looks very much like the electoral map of 2020,' Brooks notes, exploring how historical settlement patterns continue to influence modern behavior and attitudes. He cites David Hackett Fischer's work, showing that cultural traits of early English settlers in America still resonate today. This historical continuity is evident in modern voting patterns and social behaviors, highlighting the lasting impact of our ancestors' experiences.

The Power of Personal Narratives

'Apparently we live in a society in which people don’t get to tell their stories,' Brooks emphasizes. He discusses the significance of personal narratives in understanding oneself and others. People construct their life stories to make sense of their experiences, and sharing these stories can be deeply fulfilling. Brooks illustrates this with psychologist Dan McAdams' practice of inviting people to share their life stories, often leading to emotional and transformative experiences.

Practice Active Listening

Make a conscious effort to listen to others without interrupting. Show that you are engaged by nodding, maintaining eye contact, and responding thoughtfully.

Ask Deep Questions

Engage in conversations with friends or family by asking questions like, 'In our family, the one thing you must never do is _____' and 'In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ________.' These questions help uncover deep-seated values and beliefs that shape one's identity.

Create a Safe Space

Foster an environment where the person feels comfortable sharing their experiences. This can be more beneficial than trying to offer solutions or coax them out of their depression.

Embrace Generativity

Focus on how you can give back to your community or mentor others. This could be through volunteering, teaching, or simply offering support and guidance to those around you.

Reflect on Personal Heritage

Take time to reflect on how your own heritage and ancestors influence your identity and actions. This self-awareness can enhance personal growth and empathy towards others.

Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being.

The number one reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try.

Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.

If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them.

Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others.

Love is knowledge of the individual.

Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.

We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.

With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened.

Respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

People are longing to be asked questions about who they are.

The emphasis on self—individual success, self- fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization—is a catastrophe. I now think that living a good life requires a much vaster transformation.

It is a paradox that when people are finding themselves they often have a sensation that they are letting go and surrendering themselves. You stop asking, What do I want? and start asking, What is life asking of me? You respond.

We’re here to remind ourselves of values that unite us and commitments that keep us heading in the right direction. We’re here to choose again what we chose before.

Seeing well is not natural. It is an act of humility. It means getting your own self—your own needs and wishes—out of the way, so that you can see the thing you’re looking at as itself, and not just as a mirror of your own interests.

Our commitments allow us to move to a higher level of freedom.

Our commitments build our moral character.

Our commitments give us a sense of purpose.

If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self.

A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. But there’s a better thing to have—moral joy. And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love.

The fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we choose and live out those sometimes clashing commitments.

I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you.

Living a good life requires a much vaster transformation. It’s not enough to work on your own weaknesses. The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.

My core point is that happiness is good, but joy is better. Just as the second mountain is a fuller and richer phase of life after the first mountain, joy is a fuller and richer state beyond happiness.

Some people live joyfully day by day. Their daily actions are aligned with their ultimate commitments. They have given themselves away, united and wholeheartedly.

A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is. When this happens, they become fragile.

The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.

The more you are living a committed life well, the more joy will be your steady state, the frame of mind you carry around with you and shine on others. You will become a joyful person.

The people who radiate a permanent joy have given themselves over to lives of deep and loving commitment. Giving has become their nature, and little by little they have made their souls incandescent.

Happiness can be tasted alone. But permanent joy comes out of an enmeshed and embedded life. Happiness happens when a personal desire is fulfilled. Permanent moral joy seems to emerge when desire is turned outward for others.

You have to lose yourself to find yourself, give yourself away to get everything back.

Joy is not a self-standing emotion, it is the crown of a well-lived life. Joy is the emotional dimension of life that goes well and that is led well.

Once the dominant ethos was about doing your duty, but now life was about doing your own thing. Where once the group had come first, now the individual came first.

But when individualism becomes the absolutely dominant ethos of a civilization—when it is not counterbalanced with any competing ethos—then the individuals within it may have maximum freedom, but the links between the individuals slowly begin to dissolve.

In a culture of “I’m Free to Be Myself,” individuals are lonely and loosely attached. Community is attenuated, connections are dissolved, and loneliness spreads.

Freedom sucks. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation.

The ultimate heart’s desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone.

When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect.

There is some piece of your consciousness that has no shape, size, weight, or color. This is the piece of you that is of infinite value and dignity.

The soul is the seedbed of your moral consciousness and your ethical sense.

A commitment is a promise made from love. A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a return—out of sheer lovingness.

Our commitments give us our identity. They are how we introduce ourselves to strangers. They are the subjects that make our eyes shine in conversation.

We have become too cognitive when we should be more emotional; too utilitarian when we should be using a moral lens; too individualistic when we should be more communal.

If you don’t know what your life is for, how does it help to be told that your future is limitless? That just ups the pressure.

Connection happens at the nexus of truth and love. Truth without love is harshness. Love without truth is sentimentality. But if you can be completely honest with somebody in the context of loving support, then you have a trusting relationship.

Community builders believe in radical mutuality. They utterly reject the notion that some people have everything in order, and others are screwups. In their view, we are all stumblers.

As W. H. Auden put it, the task in life is to 'love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.

Community builders talk about the need to take a whole-person approach. When a child enters school, she doesn’t leave behind her healthcare issues, her safety issues, her emotional traumas, her nutritional needs, her need for purpose and meaning.

The thing everybody knows about finding a vocation is that it’s quite different from finding a career.

The sense of calling comes from the question, What is my responsibility here?

The summons to vocation is a very holy thing. It feels mystical, like a call from deep to deep.

To feel wonder in the face of beauty is to be grandly astonished. A person entranced by wonder is pulled out of the normal voice-in-your-head self-absorption and finds herself awed by something greater than herself.

The crucial terrain to be explored in any vocation search is the terrain of your heart and soul, your long-term motivation. Knowledge is plentiful; motivation is scarce.

The people who make the wisest vocation decisions are the people who live their lives every day with their desires awake and alive.

Sometimes it’s tragedy that shocks us out of false desires and helps us see our real ones.

Vocation can be a cure for self-centeredness, because to do the work well you have to pay attention to the task itself.

Just as all writing is really rewriting, all commitment is really recommitment. It’s saying yes to the thing you’ve already said yes to.

Marriage comes as a revolution. To have lived as a one and then suddenly become a two—that is an invasion. And yet there is a prize. People in long, happy marriages have won the lottery of life.

Marriage is knowing she likes to get to the airport early. Marriage is taking the time to make the bed even though you know that if you didn’t do it she probably would.

At the end of the day there is the brutal grinding effort of surrendering the ego to the altar of marriage, giving up part of yourself, the desires you have, for the larger union.

Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make. Marriage colors your life and everything in it.

We’ve all met couples like that, who have come to look alike, smile alike. I know a couple, Jim and Deb Fallows, who are famous in our circle for having the happiest marriage.

Marriage is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted. At the far end, when done well, you see people enjoying the deepest steady joy you can find on this earth.

Love starts as a focusing of attention. The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Intimacy happens when somebody shares something emotionally meaningful, and the other person receives it and shares back.

Your personality is the hidden history of the places where love entered your life or was withdrawn from your life.

Love is possible only if two people eventually reveal the center of their existences.

People are judged as much by their listening as by what they say, because when you think you are passively listening to others, you are actually teaching them about yourself.

Love plows open the hard crust of our personality and exposes the fertile soil below. Love decenters the self. It teaches us that our riches are in another.

Love can produce the most prodigious deeds in the most immediate way, without guidance by principle or command of duty. The lover knows the value of beauty and also knows that he cannot live well, or perhaps at all, alone.

Marriage is a fifty-year conversation. The most important factor in when you think about marrying someone is, Would I enjoy talking with this person for the rest of my life?

When you are making a marital commitment, you are making a vow, a promise. So another crucial question is, Does this person keep his or her promises?

Marriage starts as a joy and ends up an education. It starts as a joy because at first you get to spend every day with the person you care about most in the world, the one who makes you happiest just to be around. But then it turns into something else.

Marital love is a seeing love. Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this I mean mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company.

Marriage, like all commitments, isn’t there to make you happy; it is there to make you grow.

Recommitment often means putting your own sins on the table. Forbearance means acknowledging the wrongs that have been committed, and even the anger that they have created, but it puts anger in the context of love.

It is an immemorial law of human nature that behavior change precedes and causes attitudinal change. If you behave kindly toward a person, you will become kind and you will cherish them.

Trust the person you married. Let the other person help you. Trust them to know what’s right. Be loyal.

Second love is the kind of love people have for each other after they’ve seen each other at their worst, after they’ve forgiven a few times and been forgiven, after they can take some pride in having survived together and some comfort in the knowledge that they will survive.

The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.

Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.

We are alive in the natural world, and we use science to understand that layer of aliveness. We are also alive in another dimension, the dimension of spirit and meaning. We use the biblical stories to understand that dimension of aliveness.

If there are no overarching stories, then life is meaningless. Life does not feel meaningless. These stories provide, in their simple yet endlessly complex ways, a living script.

We are commanded to co-create the world. We are commanded to finish what God has begun. Our common salvation comes through works and good deeds.

The Christian way is the little way—small acts of radical kindness done with great love.

In my world, you take possession of your life, exercising agency. But in the Christian one, you are not even the owner of yourself. Your talents merely flow through you; you give yourself to the one who made you.

Religion doesn’t produce as many truly good people, like Wes, as you’d think it would. Religious people talk so much about holiness and goodness and love, you’d think they would be more virtuous than atheists and agnostics.

The Jew does not experience faith primarily in solitude. He or she experiences it primarily in community, in what one does with others. The synagogue is not the locus of Jewish life. The Shabbat dinner table is.

Moments of spiritual transcendence came to me as mesmerizing beauty.

The line between good and evil passes not between tribes or nations but straight through every human heart.

Some people get to the top of that first mountain, taste success, and find it…unsatisfying. 'Is this all there is?' they wonder.

A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a reward. A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

Happiness is what we aim for on the first mountain. Joy is a by-product of living on the second mountain.

The meritocracy’s soul-flattening influence is survivable if you have your own competing moral system that exists in you alongside it, but if you have no competing value system, the meritocracy swallows you whole.

Suffering teaches us gratitude. Normally we take love and friendship for granted. But in seasons of suffering, we throw ourselves on others and appreciate the gifts that our loved ones offer.

Individualism says, Shoot for personal happiness, but the person on the second mountain says, No, I shoot for meaning and moral joy.

The quality of the conversation is the quality of the marriage.

Marriage is a fifty-year conversation.

The object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

Life is not a solitary journey. It is building a home together.

Rebuilding community involves seeing that the neighborhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change.

Freedom sucks. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks.

The emphasis on self—individual success, self- fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization—is a catastrophe. I now think that living a good life requires a much vaster transformation.

It is a paradox that when people are finding themselves they often have a sensation that they are letting go and surrendering themselves. You stop asking, What do I want? and start asking, What is life asking of me? You respond.

We’re here to remind ourselves of values that unite us and commitments that keep us heading in the right direction. We’re here to choose again what we chose before.

Seeing well is not natural. It is an act of humility. It means getting your own self—your own needs and wishes—out of the way, so that you can see the thing you’re looking at as itself, and not just as a mirror of your own interests.

Depression makes it hard to imagine a time when things will ever be better.

The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.

It’s enough to create an atmosphere in which they can share their experience. It’s enough to offer them the comfort of being seen.

Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water.

Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own.

To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

Successful friendship, like successful therapy, is a balance of deference and defiance.

Wisdom is practiced when people come together to form what Parker Palmer called a 'community of truth.

Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody.

Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being.

The number one reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try.

Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.

If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them.

Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others.

Love is knowledge of the individual.

Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.

We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.

With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened.

Respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

People are longing to be asked questions about who they are.