Top 90 Oliver Burkeman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.”

— Oliver Burkeman

53. “Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”

— Oliver Burkeman

54. “To rest for the sake of rest – to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake – entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.”

— Oliver Burkeman

55. “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

56. “Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough – that you are enough – because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life.”

— Oliver Burkeman

57. “It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.”

— Oliver Burkeman

58. “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

59. “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

60. “Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.”

— Oliver Burkeman

61. “But the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.”

— Oliver Burkeman

62. “1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity.”

— Oliver Burkeman

63. “It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose everything that catches your eye.”

— Oliver Burkeman

64. “You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well – and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway.”

— Oliver Burkeman

65. “The goal, it seemed, had become a part of their identity, and so their uncertainty about the goal no longer merely threatened the plan; it threatened them as individuals.”

— Oliver Burkeman

66. “So imprudent are we,” he wrote, “that we wander in the times which are not ours.”

— Oliver Burkeman

67. “They may never speak to you again, but that won’t matter: you will have won the argument, using Science.”

— Oliver Burkeman

68. “We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”

— Oliver Burkeman

69. “4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?”

— Oliver Burkeman

70. “Each time you kiss your child goodnight, he contends, you should specifically consider the possibility that she might die tomorrow. This is jarring advice that might strike any parent as horrifying, but Epictetus is adamant: the practice will make you love her all the more, while simultaneously reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass.”

— Oliver Burkeman

71. “3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?”

— Oliver Burkeman

72. “Smart phones have been ubiquitous for years, of course – but much more recently, there seems to have been a shift in social norms. For many people, the unwritten rules of sidewalk choreography now include this: If what I’m reading or watching on my phone is sufficiently interesting to me, it’s entirely up to you to get out of my way, just as if I were very frail, or three years old, or blind. Or a lamppost.”

— Oliver Burkeman

73. “So if a certain activity really matters to you – a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause – the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.”

— Oliver Burkeman

74. “There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.”

— Oliver Burkeman

75. “For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones.”

— Oliver Burkeman

76. “Rendering yourself more efficient – either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder – won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.”

— Oliver Burkeman

77. “In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.”

— Oliver Burkeman

78. “If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.”

— Oliver Burkeman

79. “This need not be taken as an argument for abandoning all future planning whatsoever, but it serves as a warning not to strive too ardently for any single vision of the future. As Chris Kayes pointed out, the mountaineers who died climbing Everest in 1996 did successfully reach their goal; they ascended to the summit. the tragic unintended consequence was that they didn’t make it back down alive.”

— Oliver Burkeman

80. “Richard Reid, the would-be ‘shoe bomber’, had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby initiating the era of compulsory shoe-checking for all travellers.”

— Oliver Burkeman

81. “2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?”

— Oliver Burkeman

82. “This world of polluted attention creates the opportunity to sell silence back to us, at a profit.”

— Oliver Burkeman

83. “One of the more distasteful aspects of positive thinking – and of conventional approaches to happiness in general – is the way in which they seem to encourage self-absorption. Then again, ‘selfless’ approaches to happiness.”

— Oliver Burkeman

84. “He should think of himself more ‘like a frog’, she said. Shapiro was wondering whether to feel insulted when she explained: ‘You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored; then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.”

— Oliver Burkeman

85. “I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”

— Oliver Burkeman

86. “The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralysed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations.”

— Oliver Burkeman

87. “But the deeper truth remains: many of us are perpetually preoccupied with plans. It.”

— Oliver Burkeman

88. “You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one – which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.”

— Oliver Burkeman

89. “The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items.”

— Oliver Burkeman

90. “Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism. –.”

— Oliver Burkeman

91. “Healthy and happy people, research suggests, generally have a less accurate, overly optimistic grasp of their true ability to influence events than do those who are suffering from depression.”

— Oliver Burkeman

92. “The white bear challenge, after all, seems like a metaphor for much of what goes wrong in life: all too often, the outcome we’re seeking to avoid is exactly the one to which we seem magnetically lured. Wegner labelled this effect ’the precisely.”

— Oliver Burkeman

93. “You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own.”

— Oliver Burkeman

94. “Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible.”

— Oliver Burkeman

95. “It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die.”

— Oliver Burkeman

96. “To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.”

— Oliver Burkeman

97. “Develop a strong attachment to your good looks – as opposed to merely enjoying them while they last – and you will suffer when they fade, as they inevitably will; develop a strong attachment to your luxurious lifestyle, and your life may become an unhappy, fearful struggle to keep things that way.”

— Oliver Burkeman

98. “Just as a factory pumping out pollutants degrades that air for everyone, so a TV blasting cable news into an airport lounge degrades the attentional capacities of everyone nearby.”

— Oliver Burkeman

99. “He may be right about the importance of not fearing failure, but then again, you don’t hear speeches or read autobiographies by people who were unafraid of failure and then did indeed simply fail.”

— Oliver Burkeman