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“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-08-23

“For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-08-18

““Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him,” Walker Percy”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-08-13

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The Second Mountain

25 highlight(s)

David Brooks

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-08-23

“For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-08-18

““Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him,” Walker Percy”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-08-13

“One task in life is synthesis. It is to collect all the fragmented pieces of a self and bring them to a state of unity, so that you move coherently toward a single vision.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-28

“Truth without love is harshness. Love without truth is sentimentality.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“If you wanted to generalize a bit, you could say there are six layers of desire: Material pleasure. Having nice food, a nice car, a nice house. Ego pleasure. Becoming well-known or rich and successful. Winning victories and recognition. Intellectual pleasure. Learning about things. Understanding the world around us. Generativity. The pleasure we get in giving back to others and serving our communities. Fulfilled love. Receiving and giving love. The rapturous union of souls. Transcendence. The feeling we get when living in accordance with some ideal.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“The life well lived is a journey from open options to sweet compulsions.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“a commitment is different from a contract. A person making a contract is weighing pros and cons. A person entering into a contract doesn’t really change. She just finds some arrangement that will suit her current interests. A commitment, on the other hand, changes who you are, or rather embeds who you are into a new relationship.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

““To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” There is some deep part of ourselves from where desires flow. We’re defined by what we desire, not what we know.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“You don’t find your vocation through an act of taking charge. “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.””
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others. You are haunted by your conception of yourself.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“In short, the meritocracy encourages you to drift into a life that society loves but which you don’t. It’s impossible to feel wholehearted.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“Acedia is the quieting of passion. It is a lack of care. It is living a life that doesn’t arouse your strong passions and therefore instills a sluggishness of the soul, like an oven set on warm. The person living in acedia may have a job and a family, but he is not entirely grabbed by his own life. His heart is over there, but his life is over here.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“Freedom sucks. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you’re brave enough or capable enough to see into the deepest and most important parts of yourself. One of the reasons you are rushing about is because you are running away from yourself.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“There’s always a tension between self and society. If things are too tightly bound, then the urge to rebel is strong. But we’ve got the opposite problem. In a culture of “I’m Free to Be Myself,” individuals are lonely and loosely attached. Community is attenuated, connections are dissolved, and loneliness spreads. This situation makes it difficult to be good—to fulfill the deep human desires for love and connection.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“One of the greatest legacies a person can leave is a moral ecology—a system of belief and behavior that lives on after they die.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“Happiness can be tasted alone. But permanent joy comes out of an enmeshed and embedded life. Happiness happens when a personal desire is fulfilled. Permanent moral joy seems to emerge when desire is turned outward for others.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“We can help create happiness, but we are seized by joy. We are pleased by happiness, but we are transformed by joy.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“People on the second mountain have made strong commitments to one or all of these four things: A vocation A spouse and family A philosophy or faith A community”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“The only way out is to rebalance, to build a culture that steers people toward relation, community, and commitment—the things we most deeply yearn for, yet undermine with our hyper-individualistic way of life.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“Our society suffers from a crisis of connection, a crisis of solidarity. We live in a culture of hyper-individualism. There is always a tension between self and society, between the individual and the group.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“You don’t climb the second mountain the way you climb the first mountain. You conquer your first mountain. You identify the summit, and you claw your way toward it. You are conquered by your second mountain. You surrender to some summons, and you do everything necessary to answer the call and address the problem or injustice that is in front of you. On the first mountain you tend to be ambitious, strategic, and independent. On the second mountain you tend to be relational, intimate, and relentless.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“That’s the crucial way to tell whether you are on your first or second mountain. Where is your ultimate appeal? To self, or to something outside of self?”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

“The people who have been made larger by suffering are brave enough to let parts of their old self die. Down in the valley, their motivations changed. They’ve gone from self-centered to other-centered.”
The Second Mountain — David Brooks · Readwise · 2026-07-22

Nexus

3 highlight(s)

Yuval Noah Harari

“The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion.”
Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari · Readwise · 2026-07-06

“Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans.”
Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari · Readwise · 2025-01-22

“Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?”
Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari · Readwise · 2025-01-21

All books

259 total

Oranges

John McPhee

★★★★★

Read: 2026-08-27 · 160 pp · 1967 · 4.04★ avg

A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a short magazine article about oranges and orange juice, but the author kept encountering so much irresistible information that he eventually found that he had in fact written a book. It contains sketches of orange growers…