The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

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

“A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, ‘To go on thinking of her.’ ”

Duchenne-Smile

Your personality is the hidden history of the places where love entered your life or was withdrawn from your life.

It is shaped by the ways your parents loved you, the ways they did not love you.

The only cure for fear is direct action.

Love is possible only if two people eventually reveal the center of their existences. If the love is to bloom, they have to get to, This is how I’m crazy. As Alain de Botton notes, we are all crazy in some way. The crucial question at the depth of any relationship is not Is he crazy? It is What are the ways you are crazy? What parts of your life have been blocked by fear? How exactly do you self-destruct? In what ways have you not been loved?

When you choose to marry someone, you had better choose someone you’ll enjoy talking with for the rest of your life. It doesn’t work unless two people can fall into a state of fluid conversational flow. The phone calls can last hours. They can spend a fourteen-hour day together and the words don’t stop. Everything can eventually be said, and every topic can be discussed. This is what Martin Buber called “pure relation,” when I–It becomes I–Thou. This is what it feels like to be known.

“He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love,”

“Suffering makes immature love grow into mature love,”

“Immature unlearned love is egotistic. It’s the kind of love children have, demanding and wanting—and wanting instantaneously.” But the love that comes after forgiveness is marked by empathy, compassion, understanding, and inexplicable care.

“In love’s service only the wounded soldi...

love is definitely not blind. Love is the opposite of blind. It is supremely attentive. You probably can’t know a person down to the core of his soul unless you love that person.

Love and passion are not enough. You’re setting a higher bar.

There is no loneliness so lonely as the loneliness you feel when you are lying there loveless in bed with another.

Never settle: You had better feel insanely lucky to have this person.

Would I enjoy talking with this person for the rest of my life?

“Instead of turning into a rejected little girl that needed to pound on doors to be heard, she needed to learn to stay an adult and ask for what she wanted in a way that would increase the likelihood of getting it.”

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

“Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”

Overwhelm the negative by increasing the positive.

“Can we take a walk this afternoon?” and “You relax. I’ll vacuum.”

If you behave kindly toward a person, you will become kind and you will cherish them.

And in that way good teaching is like planting. Those teachers like Weintraub were inserting seeds that would burst in us years or decades later when the realities of adult life called them forth.

Once you’ve had a glimpse of the highest peaks of the human experience, it’s hard to live permanently in the flatlands down below. It’s a little hard to be shallow later in life, no matter how inclined in that direction you might be.

“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish. I have an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything goes thither now. What happens there I do not know.”

A sublime artistic experience is more worth wanting than a Snickers bar.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.

while the body grows according to what it consumes, the soul grows by the measure of love it pours out.

everything can be taken from a man but one thing—the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire.

human beings’ primary motive is not for money or even happiness, but for meaning. We are driven above all to understand the purpose of our lives. Once that is understood even the most miserable conditions cannot upend inner peace.

I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

The key question is whether they respond to the challenge with the right inner posture—whether they express charity when it is called for, forgiveness when it is necessary, and great humility before goodness.

a leap of faith, doesn’t happen when you are ready to make it. It happens, Zornberg says, when you are not quite ready. The leap is made by one who is hurried, troubled, a little nervous but still ecstatic and energetic.

Influences come in and are buried so deep it’s hard to see the mechanism by which they wield their power.

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. In my experience they are not, and some religious people, like the Catholic priests who prey on young children, live very religious lives that are also very bad.

“When they realize that nobody cares, that nobody will answer them, children no longer cry. It takes too much energy. We cry out only when there is hope that someone may hear us.”

“We human beings are all fundamentally the same,” he wrote. “We all belong to a common, broken humanity. We all have wounded, vulnerable hearts. Each one of us needs to feel appreciated and understood; we all need help.”

In seasons of suffering, you have a tendency to grip the steering wheel tighter, trying to redirect life, but sometimes you get defeated and just let go of the wheel. Strange things begin happening. “Healing means moving from your pain to the pain,”

“When you keep focusing on the specific circumstances of your pain, you easily become angry, resentful, and even vindictive….But real healing comes from realizing that your own particular pain is a share of humanity’s pain….Every time you can shift your attention away from the external situation that caused your pain and focus on the pain of humanity in which you participate, your suffering becomes easier to bear.” The knowledge that we acquire through suffering can be articulated, but it can’t really be understood by someone who did not endure the path it took to get there. I will say I did not come out of that pit with empty hands. Life had to beat me up a bit before I was tender enough to be touched. It had to break me a bit before I could be broken open. Suffering opened up the deepest sources of the self and exposed fresh soil for new growth.

There are holy sparks in every occasion and a cosmic universe in every person.

The weak and the outcast are often closer to God than the great and the wise, because they are further from pride and self-sufficiency.

You can only find yourself by losing yourself.

“Our only truly essential human task here, Jesus teaches, is to grow beyond the survival instincts of the animal brain and the egoic operating system into the kenotic joy and generosity of full human personhood. His mission was to show us how to do this.”

meaning can be found by the attitude one takes toward unavoidable suffering.

The fourth ramp is spiritual consciousness. We in the secular world tend to reduce everything to material cause and effect—economics, voting patterns, international relations. But that lens is constantly getting things wrong, because human beings are not just material creatures driven by narrowly defined economic and political self-interests.

It feels like faith in wider possibilities than I had imagined and living one’s life in the shadow of those possibilities.

Reality shimmers.

but how quick is my pace, how open are my possibilities, and how vast are my hopes.