Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure
The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.
They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.
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.
Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.
Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.
As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.
The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned.
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 degree.
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.
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.
Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.
There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.
(A middle-class child’s) parents didn’t just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.
To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.
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,
The inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.
I make honorable things pleasant to children.” A teacher from Sparta
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.
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.
Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.
They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to prove anything to the world:
[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.
It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.
Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.
if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.
In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.
You can’t counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.
Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.
Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.
The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.
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 fulfilling yes.
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.
How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?
Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.
Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.
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.
College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few.
We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.
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.
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.
Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; “The night cometh.
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.