David Brooks Quotes

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

We are people in circumstances who make choices that we think are right at the time.

Life's complicated and people do things for a lot of reasons.

People are unpredictable at the end of the day.

You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit.

It's very hard to predict what people are thinking.

Humans were always surprising me.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.

I think certain people are the way they are for certain reasons that we can't necessarily judge without knowing.

Human beings are strange creatures. As people come across one another they produce various outcomes. Good things, sometimes. And other times, bad.

the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

Most people believe they have a clear idea of what's right and wrong. Many say they know how they'll act, or how they'll handle an extreme situation. But to be honest, no one knows. Not reallyBecause none of us truly knows what we'll do when the circumstances become so overwhelming and complex that we can't even tell right from wrong.

I believe that women are many different types of people. There are brave women, there are cowardly women, there are altruistic women, there are selfish women. Most people are a combination of the same.

I think every case is different. Every situation is different. People come on the F.B.I.'s radar screen for a variety of reasons at a variety of times.

People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day - even hour to hour.

Pieces and parts were always easier to process. The full picture, the entire story, was another thing entirely. But you just never knew. Sometimes, people could surprise you.

What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.

Right time, right place, right people equals success. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.

My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.

Tohru: Shigure is always smiling. But, I wonder if I gave him some problems with my request. Yuki: The only ones who can truly understand what Shigure is thinking is Hatori and... a few other people. Someone has said this before. It is said that he is like a "tide..." A tide that carries you away when you get too close to it. The tide touches your feet... But when you reach down to touch it, it will have already departed. It is within your reach, yet you may never catch it.

Did people ever stop changing? They surprised you with fresh pain. Sometimes they surprised you with happiness, but the pain was the sharper surprise. There was no way to protect yourself from it. People could always change and always hurt you. Of course it went in the other direction too, you could hurt them when you didn't intend it and that too was out of your control.

People aren't just people, they are people surrounded by circumstances.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.