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Quote by David Brooks

“As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.”

Quote by David Brooks

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David Brooks
David Brooks

David Brooks is an American commentator and writer known for his insightful views on political, cultural, and social issues. Born on August 11, 1961, he graduated from Columbia University and has served as a columnist for The New York Times. Brooks has also appeared on various television and radio programs as a commentator. more

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“today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it is almost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensible to the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clear conscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselves to death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – that On the Genealogy of Morality 42 48 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4. 49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp. 143–4. 50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31–7. is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-human proposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as people say, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act out a ‘demonstration’ of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is what the oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punishment, too, has such very strong festive aspects! –”

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Book:On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo
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“There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action. Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle.”

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Book:Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems
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