Top 80 The School of Life Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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 honored as especially “nice,” but it can be important to explore and hold on to it nevertheless.”

— The School of Life

2. “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

3. “In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.”

— The School of Life

4. “What separates a good day from a bad one is not necessarily that we have been without stress or have returned home early. It is that we have derived a tangible impression of having made a difference to the lives of others. It turns out that it is simply not enough to make only ourselves happy.”

— The School of Life

5. “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

6. “Empathy has to be forged by personal suffering.”

— The School of Life

7. “One of the key things that can go wrong in our search for love is that we get fixated on a particular person who turns out not to be a promising or realistic option.”

— The School of Life

8. “What we call depression is in fact sadness and anger that have for too long not been paid the attention they deserve.”

— The School of Life

9. “The root cause of impostor syndrome is an unhelpful picture of what people at the top of society are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we can’t imagine how equally flawed the elite must necessarily also be underneath their polished surfaces.”

— The School of Life

10. “You are but a blip in eternal cosmic time; whether your speech unfolds well or badly, or you soil your trousers or not, is a matter of sublime, beautiful indifference to planet Kepler-22b, 587 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus.”

— The School of Life

11. “The problem with our world is that it does not stop emphasizing that success, calm, happiness, and fulfillment could, somehow, one day be ours. And in this way it never ceases to torture us.”

— The School of Life

12. “One has to feel very small in order to belittle.”

— The School of Life

13. “The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation.”

— The School of Life

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.”

— The School of Life

17. “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

18. “The wise have made their peace with the yawning gap between how they would ideally want to be and what they are actually like. They have come to terms with their tendencies to idiocy, ugliness, and error. They are not fundamentally ashamed of themselves because they have already shed so much of their pride.”

— The School of Life

19. “The potential of daydreaming isn’t recognized by societies obsessed with productivity. But some of our greatest insights come when we stop trying to be purposeful and instead respect the creative potential of reverie. Window daydreaming is a strategic rebellion against the excessive demands of immediate, but in the end insignificant, pressures in favor of the diffuse, but very serious, search for the wisdom of the unexplored deep self.”

— The School of Life

20. “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

21. “Politeness does not prevent a person from feeling angry or upset or hurt. What it does is delay the expression of the feeling. Manners counteract the rush to judgement. They allow a few moments for more information to emerge, for the ire to reduce slightly before doing anything decisive. The delay built into politeness allows you time to determine the true facts. It provides space to understand the issue behind the anger. If you knew more, you might not be so irate.”

— The School of Life

22. “We love in part in the hope of being helped and redeemed by our lovers. There is an underlying desire for education and growth. We hope to change a little in their presence, becoming, through their help, better versions of ourselves. Just below the surface, love contains a hope for reparation and education. We usually think of education as something harsh imposed upon us against our will, but love promises to educate us in a more gentle and seductive way.”

— The School of Life

23. “Being told we simply have to love someone for all that they are, or else think of ourselves as bad people, is asking for the impossible. How could someone never want to change any part of us if they know us properly? Do.”

— The School of Life

24. “The primary thing we need to learn is not just maths or spelling, but how to be good: we need to learn about courage, self-control, reasonableness, independence and calm.”

— The School of Life

25. “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

26. “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

27. “There can wisely be no “solutions,” no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. What we can aim for, at best, is consolation – a word tellingly lacking in glamour. To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we’d like to render as comfortable, as interesting, and as kind as possible.”

— The School of Life

28. “We may believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity.”

— The School of Life

29. “Worldly success is the consolation prize for those unhappy driven souls who have redirected their early humiliation and sense that they weren’t good enough into ‘achievements’ – which will never make up for the unconditional love they will deep down always crave in vain.”

— The School of Life

30. “Anger is, in the Stoic analysis, caused by the violent collision of hope and reality. We.”

— The School of Life

31. “One of the more frustrating, yet fundamental, things about being human is that we can’t understand ourselves very well.”

— The School of Life

32. “We need to imagine the turmoil, disappointment, worry and sheer confusion in people who may outwardly appear merely aggressive.”

— The School of Life

33. “Confidence isn’t the belief that we won’t meet obstacles: it is the recognition that difficulties are an inescapable part of all worthwhile contributions. We need to ensure we have plenty of narratives to hand that normalise the role of pain, anxiety and disappointment in even the best and most successful lives.”

— The School of Life

34. “A meaningful life is close to, but at points importantly different from, a happy life.”

— The School of Life

35. “But that is just as illusory. It doesn’t matter what goals we have: they will never be enough. Life is a process of replacing one anxiety and one desire with another. No goal spares us renewed goal seeking. The only stable element in our lives is craving; the only destination is the journey.”

— The School of Life

36. “An affair puts our vagabond romantic imaginations usefully to the test; it challenges our unfair, sentimental suspicions that the pain and melancholy we sometimes feel is specifically the fault of our partner, rather than a general feature of existence.”

— The School of Life

37. “The ideal parent is not anxiously hanging around trying to micromanage everything. The ideal parent makes it feel that problems, difficulties and dangers don’t always have to be avoided: they can be coped with, solved or skilfully overcome. Such a parent makes the child secure.”

— The School of Life

38. “But, as Montaigne recognised, other people – even clever ones – will be silent on many important themes that circulate in our minds. If we allow existing thinkers to define the boundaries of our curiosity, we will needlessly hold back the development of our minds.”

— The School of Life

39. “Different friends bring to the fore different sides of who we are: they influence us, encourage us and make us feel more at ease in varied ways. With one friend, we become more intellectual than usual; with another more adventurous, or more serious about politics, or more tender towards family. With a wide range of friends within reach, we are able to assemble and connect with the full, properly rounded, version of ourselves.”

— The School of Life

40. “The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness.”

— The School of Life

41. “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

42. “We believe we seek happiness in love, but actually what we often seek is familiarity – which may complicate any plans we might have for happiness.”

— The School of Life

43. “There’s the sorrow of losing someone we liked, but there is also the suffering caused by the unfortunate ways a lover acted at the end which tells us about them, but not really about us. We may not be able to escape the agony of a broken heart but we can always strive to keep the suffering to a wise minimum.”

— The School of Life

44. “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

— The School of Life

45. “But simplicity is really an achievement – it follows from hard-won clarity about what matters.”

— The School of Life

46. “Excessive self-hatred is a great enemy of relationships, but so too is excessive self-love.”

— The School of Life

47. “The road to calmer relationships therefore isn’t necessarily about removing points of contention. It’s rather about assuming that they are going to happen and that they will inevitably require quite a lot of time and thought to address.”

— The School of Life

48. “This is often taken to signal a basic nastiness in human nature, but the truth is more poignant. We are not so much crowing when we hear of failure as deeply reassured to know that we aren’t humiliatingly alone with the appalling difficulties of being alive. It is all too easy to suspect that we have been uniquely cursed in the extent of our troubles, of which we seldom find evidence in the lives around us.”

— The School of Life

49. “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

50. “However initially persuasive this thesis feels, it fails to diagnose what empathy truly involves. The way properly to enter the mind of another person is not to forget about oneself entirely; rather, it is to use one’s knowledge of oneself to penetrate the consciousness of another. The best way to unearth the secrets of complete strangers is to look honestly into our own hearts.”

— The School of Life