You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.
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.
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 own. An admissions offic...
(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience ...
Freedom without structure is its own slavery.
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.
Humanities are the instructors of enchantment.
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 the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can ...
People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard.
The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.
In childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid and fresh, and sometimes hits with terrifying force.
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.
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.
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.
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 from beyond the barrier of what happen...
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 home they wonder if there’s something wron...
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 happiness. It is usually the ordeals t...
They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to prove anything to the world:
People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we are all built from “crooked timber”— from Immanuel Kant’s famous line, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made...
