The School of Life > Quotes

“love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. It”
― The School of Life, Relationships

“Hold your beliefs lightly.’ Certainty is not necessarily a friend of sanity, although it is often mistaken for it.”
― The School of Life, How to Stay Sane

“Two people should see a relationship as a constant opportunity to improve and be improved. When lovers teach each other uncomfortable truths, they are not giving up on love. They are trying to do something very true to love: which is to make their partners more loveable.”
― The School of Life, Relationships

“The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“We may believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity.”
― The School of Life, Relationships

“We will be reminded – once more – that love is a skill, not an emotion.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“Paradoxically, it is friendship that often offers us the real route to the pleasures that Romanticism associates with love. That this sounds surprising is only a reflection of how underdeveloped our day-to-day vision of friendship has become. We associate it with a casual acquaintance we see only once in a while to exchange inconsequential and shallow banter. But real friendship is something altogether more profound and worthy of exultation. It is an arena in which two people can get a sense of each other’s vulnerabilities, appreciate each other’s follies without recrimination, reassure each other as to their value and greet the sorrows and tragedies of existence with wit and warmth. Culturally and collectively, we have made a momentous mistake which has left us both lonelier and more disappointed than we ever needed to be. In a better world, our most serious goal would be not to locate one special lover with whom to replace all other humans but to put our intelligence and energy into identifying and nurturing a circle of true friends. At the end of an evening, we would learn to say to certain prospective companions, with an embarrassed smile as we invited them inside – knowing that this would come across as a properly painful rejection – ‘I’m so sorry, couldn’t we just be … lovers?”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“Irritability is anger that lacks self-knowledge.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“In other words, whatever we choose will be a bit wrong, so we shouldn’t agonise too much about any one choice we make.”
― The School of Life, How to Find Love

“But simplicity is really an achievement – it follows from hard-won clarity about what matters.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“Being properly mature involves a frank, unfrightened relationship with one’s own darkness, complexity and ambition. It involves accepting that not everything that makes us happy will please others or be honoured as especially ‘nice’, but it can be important to explore and hold on to it nevertheless.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“If we cannot always be entirely sane in our relationships, the kindest thing we can do for those who care about us is to hand over some maps that try to chart and guide others through the more disturbed regions of our internal world.”
― The School of Life, Relationships

“We need to imagine the turmoil, disappointment, worry and sheer confusion in people who may outwardly appear merely aggressive.”
― The School of Life, Relationships

“It’s deeply poignant that we should expend so much effort on trying to look strong before the world when, all the while, it’s really only ever the revelation of the somewhat embarrassing, sad, melancholy, and anxious bits of us that renders us endearing to others and transforms strangers into friends.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“People are bad, always, because they are in difficulty. They slander, gossip, denigrate, and growl because they are not in a good place. Though they may seem strong, though their attacks can place them in an apparently dominant role, their ill intentions are all the proof we require to know as a certainty that they are not well. Contented people have no need to hurt others.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“One of the greatest privileges of being on one's own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, quite an easy person to live with.”
― The School of Life, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person: & Other Essays

“We will still be anxious when we finally have the house, the relationship and the right income.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“The real skill is not always to strive to make better choices; it’s to know how to make our peace with our necessarily bad choices. We”
― The School of Life, How to Find Love

“The central solution to all this trouble is to normalise a new and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how healthy and mature it is to be fragile and in repeated need of reassurance – and at the same time, how difficult it is to reveal one’s vulnerable dependence.”
― The School of Life, Relationships

“A meaningful life is close to, but at points importantly different from, a happy life.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“We are surrounded by stories that conspire to make success seem easier than it is, and therefore that unwittingly destroy the confidence we can muster in the face of our obstacles.”
― The School of Life, On Confidence

“but people simply never need to harm others if they are not first tormented themselves.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“Anxiety is not a sign of sickness, a weakness of the mind, or an error for which we should always seek a medical solution. It is mostly a hugely reasonable and sensitive response to the genuine strangeness, terror, uncertainty, and riskiness of existence.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting life skills anyone can have.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“One has to feel very small in order to belittle.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.”
― The School of Life, Relationships

“There is no such thing as a hurt that is too small to matter when emotional closeness is at stake.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“We need to become better friends to ourselves.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“We need to be alone because life among other people unfolds too quickly.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“We should at all points spare ourselves the burden of loneliness. We are far from the only ones to be suffering. Everyone is more anxious than they are inclined to tell us. Even the tycoon and the couple in love are in pain. We have collectively failed to admit to ourselves how much anxiety is our default state.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: An Emotional Education