David Brooks · 288 pages
Rating: (3.6K votes)
“Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“To get the most attention, the essay should be wrong. Logical essays are read and understood. But an illogical or wrong essay will prompt dozens of other writers to rise and respond, thus giving the author mounds of publicity.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“You can't really know God if you ignore his laws, especially the ones that regulate the most intimate spheres of life. You may be responsible and healthy, but you will also be shallow and inconsequential.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“They turn nature into an achievement course, a series of ordeals and obstacles they can conquer. They go into nature to behave unnaturally. In nature animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort. But Bobo naturalists flee comfort and seek cold and deprivation.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“The first thing you see, covering yards and yards of one wall, is an object that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor, but is really the stove.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“a statement by Bertrand Russell ... embodies the tone of heroic denunciation that you can muster only if you have drunk deeply from the cup of your own oracular majesty”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“If the article mentions some celebrity-perhaps a recently dead politician-the author will want to mention some pointless detail from her last meeting with that person or the emotions she experienced when learning of the subject's death.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“If done correctly, these techniques can allow the Bobo pilgrim to have 6 unforgettable moments a morning, 2 rapturous experiences over lunch, 1.5 profound insights in the afternoon (on average), and .667 life-altering epiphanies after each sunset.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“Bobos are uncomfortable with universal moral laws that purport to regulate pleasure. Bobos prefer more prosaic self-controlled regimes. The things that are forbidden are unhealthy or unsafe. The things that are encouraged are enriching or calorie burning. In other words, we regulate our carnal desires with health codes instead of moral codes.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“If you live in a society like ours, in which people seldom object if they hear someone taking the Lord's name in vain but are outraged if they see a pregnant woman smoking, then you are living in a world that values the worldly more than the divine.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“[The public intellectual] will also describe how she can work a pop culture reference into her essay, comparing the Supreme Court to the creature in the number-one box office movie of the moment. Editors like this sort of mass-media integration, first, because it gives them a way to illustrate the piece, and second because they are under the delusion that pop-culture references will propel a piece's readership into the five-digit area.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
David Brooks
Born place: in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Born date August 10, 1961
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“No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is...dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.
I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Odd Hours
“Yet even as the wind stirs your petals, flowers fall. My flowers are eternal, my songs live forever. I lift them in offering; I, a singer. I cast them to the wind, I spill them. The flowers become gold, they come to dwell inside the palace of eternity.”
― Jacqueline Carey, quote from Naamah's Blessing
“This can't be real," he said into my hair. "This has to be an acid flashback." I laughed, delighted to be in his arms. "I swear I'm not an acid flashback.”
― April Lindner, quote from Jane
“Prayer is not appointed for the furnishing of God with the knowledge of what we need, but is designed as a confession to Him of our sense of need.”
― Arthur W. Pink, quote from The Sovereignty of God
“There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
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