Top 90 Oliver Burkeman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.”

— Oliver Burkeman

2. “The real trick to producing great work isn’t to find ways to eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your depth. Instead, it’s to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We’re all in deep water. Which is fine: it’s by far the most exciting place to be.”

— Oliver Burkeman

3. “Resisting a task is usually a sign that it’s meaningful-which is why it’s awakening your fears and stimulating procrastination. You could adopt “Do whatever you’re resisting the most” as a philosophy of life.”

— Oliver Burkeman

4. “True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity – in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.”

— Oliver Burkeman

5. “Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.”

— Oliver Burkeman

6. “The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”

— Oliver Burkeman

7. “Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.”

— Oliver Burkeman

8. “It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort.”

— Oliver Burkeman

9. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”

— Oliver Burkeman

10. “Uncertainty is where things happen.”

— Oliver Burkeman

11. “Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

— Oliver Burkeman

12. “Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable truth that everything is impermanent.”

— Oliver Burkeman

13. “Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?”.”

— Oliver Burkeman

14. “What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.”

— Oliver Burkeman

15. “We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them; their flourishing depends on a certain degree of not being protected, of being open to experiences both negative and positive.”

— Oliver Burkeman

16. “An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and “your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is” – and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long.”

— Oliver Burkeman

17. “Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.”

— Oliver Burkeman

18. “Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?”

— Oliver Burkeman

19. “Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.”

— Oliver Burkeman

20. “5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?”

— Oliver Burkeman

21. “The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not.”

— Oliver Burkeman

22. “I came to understand that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.”

— Oliver Burkeman

23. “Ask yourself whether you are happy’, observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, ‘and you cease to be so.’ At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.”

— Oliver Burkeman

24. “Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.”

— Oliver Burkeman

25. “Mainly, it’s not that there are things you can’t say. It’s that there are things you can’t say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.”

— Oliver Burkeman

26. “Without noticing we’re doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.”

— Oliver Burkeman

27. “Ultimately, what defines the ‘cult of optimism’ and the culture of positive thinking – even in its most mystically tinged, New Age forms – is that it abhors a mystery. It seeks to make things certain, to make happiness permanent and final. And yet this kind of happiness – even if you do manage to achieve it – is shallow and unsatisfying. The greatest benefit of negative capability – the true power of negative thinking – is that it lets the mystery back in.”

— Oliver Burkeman

28. “Bereaved people who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief, research suggests, take the longest to recover from their loss.”

— Oliver Burkeman

29. “The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.”

— Oliver Burkeman

30. “The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities.”

— Oliver Burkeman

31. “1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?”

— Oliver Burkeman

32. “We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.”

— Oliver Burkeman

33. “Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help. And once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.”

— Oliver Burkeman

34. “One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”

— Oliver Burkeman

35. “Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.”

— Oliver Burkeman

36. “The unconscious is the repository of everything that we’re avoiding.”

— Oliver Burkeman

37. “You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way. – Marlo Stanfield in The Wire.”

— Oliver Burkeman

38. “Attachment, this argument runs, is the only thing that motivates anyone to accomplish anything worthwhile in the first place. If you weren’t attached to things being a certain way, rather than another way – and to feeling certain emotions, rather than others – why would you ever attempt to thrive professionally, to better your material circumstances, to raise children, or to change the world?”

— Oliver Burkeman

39. “Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.”

— Oliver Burkeman

40. “Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.”

— Oliver Burkeman

41. “It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.”

— Oliver Burkeman

42. “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

— Oliver Burkeman

43. “You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”

— Oliver Burkeman

44. “The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”

— Oliver Burkeman

45. “It was called Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, and its author, a man named Barry Magid, argued that the idea of using meditation to make your life ‘better’ or ‘happier’, in any conventional sense, was a misunderstanding.”

— Oliver Burkeman

46. “There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”

— Oliver Burkeman

47. “I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems.4 With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.”

— Oliver Burkeman

48. “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,’ argued the social psychologist Erich Fromm. ‘Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’ Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.”

— Oliver Burkeman

49. “Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.”

— Oliver Burkeman

50. “You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.”

— Oliver Burkeman