David Brooks Quotes

I am sure that few successful men are so-called 'natural geniuses.'

It is a natural gift I was born with but it's something I've had to nurture in training.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

If someone arrives, fully functional yet a tabula rasa, how does their environment influence, educate, even mold them? And if that is a nurture question, then where does that character's nature fit in? How does that manifest?

I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.

It is surprising how many people who don't read believe they have a book in them. Why? Nobody would imagine that Alfred Brendel took up the piano on a whim at 25 when he found accountancy unpleasant.

Ultimately, it's down to the individual. Some people are born to perform. Some people need to work hard to control themselves.

There's nothing I really wanted to do in life that I wasn't able to get good at. That's my skill. I'm not really specifically talented at anything except for the ability to learn. That's what I do. That's what I'm here for.

You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.

It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius.

Nature is a definite thing. But nurture is just as powerful. It can really mess with you.

I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.

If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly have been said to have done so instinctively.

Everyone is an artist and a genius, I think. If we don't choose to limit ourselves then we are totally accomplished.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

If you look across a host of measures at adoption studies, fraternal v. identical twin studies, twins-raised-apart studies, the history of early childhood intervention research, naturally-occurring experiments, differences between societies, changes over history, and so forth, you tend to come up with nature and nurture as being about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty. The glass is roughly half-full and half-empty.

The egalitarian doctrine is manifestly contrary to all the facts established by biology and by history. Only fanatical partisans of this theory can contend that what distinguishes the genius from the dullard is entirely the effect of postnatal influences.

To be sure, we have inherited abilities, but our development we owe to thousands of influences coming from the world around us from which we appropriate what we can and what is suitable to us.

Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.

I may not be Einstein but I know dumb plus dumb equals you.

Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.

Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned.